Book Air
by Sythe
Summary: To regain her bending, Korra must make a choice, go back to the past and either kill a teenage Noatak, or save him. But things are never as simple as they appear. Amorra/Noarra. NoatakxKorra.
1. Chapter 1

Disclaimer: I do not own Legend of Korra and its characters.

_**Book Air**_

Premise: To regain her bending, Korra must make a choice, go back to the past and either kill a teenage Noatak, or save him.

**Chapter 1:** A Crossroad

* * *

The event that started everything for Korra began with a simple request.

"Walk with me Korra"

Aang told her one winter day on the South Pole. Korra watched him turn his back to her and walk away wordlessly. Sunlight drew a patch on his back and followed him in a dance of shadow and light. Step. Shadow. Step. Light. The dull roar of the sea down below swallowed the sound of his feet trekking through the snow.

For all the things Aang seemed to be, a spirit of the past seemed the least likely. He appeared as any man would, fleshly, solid, tangible. If it weren't for the hundred times the White Lotus grannies had drilled into her head about her past reincarnations (history, politics, deeds, because apparently some thousand poor souls would die if Korra didn't know which year the treaty of the North Sea was signed, watched over by the concurrent Avatar), Korra might have mistaken him for an ordinary Air acolyte who just happened to be stranded on the wrong side of the continent.

She stood stock still, studying him in her awe-stricken stupor, not really believing that she had made contact with her past life for the first time just yet because just how many times had she yelled at Tenzin that 'No no no, spiritual thingamajig ain't my thing' over the past few months? And now all of sudden, Aang was popping right out of the blue, right in front of her face, without her doing any of that 'Oooommm' spirit mumbo jumbo they had taught her to. Like _'Hi Korra, I guess you should have cried a little more then we would have had this conversation waayy sooner'_ kind of popping out of the blue. Totally unexpected and kind of… what was that term Shiro Shinobi used… deus ex-machina-y when she stopped to think about it.

A mere five minutes ago, she was still standing on the edge of the cliff, facing the frozen South Sea, contemplating things she shouldn't be contemplating in her head, and trying to overcome the shock of being bereft off her bending. Now she was having a conversation with her famous past life, Avatar Aang, Avatar Excuse-me-Ima-take-your-bending-now-Ozai-hun Aang, and being invited for a stroll through the snow with him.

Surprised? Yes. Yes timed a million.

She probably would have stood there a good while more if it weren't for her Air Nomad Incarnation.

"Korra?" Aang looked over his shoulder at her, one eyebrow arched. Immediately, she snapped out of her silent daze.

"Right. Coming" She trekked after him through the snow, rubbing the cold tip of her nose. She was suddenly giddy and light-headed. She had made first contact! That meant she was still the Avatar.

Her heart thumbed wildly in her ribcage. Maybe… she didn't dare voice it just yet… but maybe, there was a way to fix this… this freaky bloodbending Amon had put on her. The moment the thought came alive in her head, she couldn't help but let it bring her heart soaring. The place where her bending once was was a gaping wound, still warm and oozing, and she so very dearly needed the balm this one single thought brought.

Aang and his Zen-y beard thing. Aang can energy-bend. Aang can go into the Avatar State, a state which kicked Yakone's psychic bloodbending ass seven ways from Ba Sing Se to princess Yue's snazzy house up the skies. And if it can do that to Yakone, then she could just guess what it would do to Yakone's son's bloodbending. Say buhbye to your bending Amon. The thought rang in her ears and an image popped into her head - a drawn and crayon-colored cartoon version of her sticking her tongue out at a sad-face Amon (Suck on it. I win!) while cartoon Aang in orange and yellow spandex with Super A plastered over his chest stood over them and flexed his muscles threateningly at Amon – and she couldn't help but relish on it.

"Where are we going?" She blurted out the moment she caught up to Aang, breathless from the barely contained excitement in her chest.

Aang glanced at her sideway, smiling gently and wearing an expression she couldn't remember ever seeing on her face in the mirror. Wow, but was she a total lily-liver in her past life? She finally got what Chief Beifong was going on about her and Tenzin's dad all the time now.

"We are going… to the place where it all began." Aang said simply.

"Where it all began?" She echoed. And before she could elaborate her question further, the snowbound landscape of the South Pole suddenly faded away. The sun blinked out above her head, replaced by the bluish whiteness of electric-charged light bulbs. The ground gave way to marble floor. Blue skies disappeared in the face of a courtroom full of people.

"This…" She stopped short.

"Yakone's trial…" Aang finished her sentence.

"Yakone's trial?" Korra repeated, a hint of incredulousness in her voice. "This… is where it all began?" Seriously? Psychic bloodbender, Republic City crime lord, Tarrlok **and** Amon's father as well as their bloodbending master? Just what else did this guy do? Pluck the moon from the skies?

"No. Not where it began, but where I made the choice."

The scene changed. People moved in ghostly afterthoughts of the past, flowing and ebbing in wisps of light. Korra watched the story unfold as she did mere days ago in the metal cage Tarrlok had imprisoned her in. The trial, the defense, the discovery of Yakone's bloodbending ability, the subsequent disastrous confrontation. She shivered involuntarily. When she had first seen this, she had only had the dubious pleasure of being bloodbent by Tarrlok, the younger of the two brothers, the weaker bloodbender. Now, though…. now she had known what it felt like to be held, limp and helpless as a doll in the grip of Amon's psychic bloodbending. Seeing Yakone bloodbending for a second time, seeing all those people, Aang, councilman Sokka, Toph Lin's-mom Beifong held in limbo in the air, and knowing he was the root of Amon's origin was planting something very unpleasant in the pit of her stomach.

"What choice?" She asked, cutting the thought in her head in half. That was a place she didn't want to revisit, a sensation she didn't want to taste again.

"To kill… or to spare" Aang replied succinctly. The motion stopped as he finished, freezing at the exact moment where past-Aang held Yakone down with Earthbending, one hand on his head, one on his chest, right above his heart.

Energybending. Korra ran her hands up and down her arms, trying to smooth away the goose bumps breaking out on her skin. A dark and empty place in her ached at the sight.

Aang turned to face her and as he did so, someone stepped out from inside him, a woman, tall, intimidating, and wearing the most outlandish makeup. Korra recognized her right away. Avatar Kyoshi. One of the most successful Avatars of the past, whose methods she had been forced to study at great length under the tutelage of the White Lotus.

Kyoshi eyed the frozen Yakone coldly and when she spoke, her voice came out clear and certain as if she was stating the fact that the sun rose from the East and set in the West.

"It would have been easier if I had killed him."

_I_? Oh, right. They were all essentially one and the same, the Avatar, the one single soul reincarnated countless times. Moments like this made Korra feel as if she was the person with the worst case of MPD on the planet.

"I stand by my decision. Violence is not the answer." Aang crossed his arms almost petulantly while Kyoshi looked down at him from her far superior height.

The next thing that happened ranked very high on Korra's scale of things she didn't believe she would ever see in her lifetime, right below Katara using bloodbending to prank fire lord Zuko and a bit above Tenzin and Lin Beifong having a tongue wrestle which must have happened at some point in the past but thankfully Korra had never had to bear witness to. She was seeing her past incarnations, the two facets of a single soul, hers, having a staring battle over a dead bloodbender crime lord and abusive dad extraordinaire. She briefly revisited the assessment of the severity of her multiple personality disorder before butting in between the two Avatars.

"Well, violence may not be the answer, but it sure is looking very tempting right now to me." She fixed Aang a look, subtly taking Kyoshi's side in the argument. "Aang, I can't bend."

She heard the childishness in her own voice and almost winced, then she saw the look that crawled past Aang's face and all of a sudden she felt like a hole was opening up under her feet.

In another lifetime, Aang would have appeared before Korra along with the thousand lives they had lived in the past. In another lifetime, he would have returned to her what was hers by birthright but what she never truly earned for herself with a simple touch to her forehead. In another lifetime, she would have returned this same gesture, rebestowing the gift of bending to Lin Bei-fong and many others after her.

This was not that lifetime.

"You… you can't return my bending… can you?" Because if Aang could, he wouldn't be looking at her with pity in his eyes.

Aang had no answer to her question. Instead, he threw his own at her.

"What does being an Avatar mean to you, Korra? What is an Avatar?"

There was a disbelieving silence for a full minute as Korra stared at her predecessor uncomprehendingly, her brain still in the process of dissimilating the meaning of his question.

"What do you mean being an Avatar mean to me?" She exploded. Helplessness and frustration gave way to anger. "It means everything!" She threw out her hands. "I was the Avatar when I was four! I was the Avatar all my life! If I am not the Avatar, then what am I? Some Southern Water Tribe girl fated to grow up, marry, produce a child then die? If I am not the Avatar then I am nothing!"

As soon as the word left her mouth, she felt her strength seeping out of her chest, leaving her cold and empty. It was as if she had unknowingly opened the floodgate to the reservoir of her own mental fortitude and now that she realized it was leaving her, flowing out of her in unstoppable streams, she didn't have the slightest clue how to close it. "I was the Avatar before I even knew who I was." Her own voice surprised her. So weak and small, and nothing like the girl who had once fearlessly announced to three White Lotus members that she was the Avatar and they gotta deal with it when she was four years old. "If I am not the Avatar, then I am nothing." She repeated and listened to the sound of her own words being swallowed up in the silence that followed.

A sob was forming in her chest, slowly breaking out but she held it in, gripping onto it with her teenage pride. She willed her eyes downward, glaring balefully at the asphalt road of Republic City as her nose went wet and tingly.

"This is the reason why we are only let known our true identity when we reach sixteen years of age." Kyoshi laid a hand on her shoulder. "Each incarnation must be allowed the time to form their own sense of self or they will break under the weight of their Avatar identity." Kyoshi's hand went up to her chin, pushing her to look up at Aang in front of her. "For thousands of lifetimes, this rule was upheld, with two exceptions."

Of course. Aang who had known at twelve years old under the pressure of war, and she who had smashed the Avatar anonymity to pieces with her self-taught bending at four years old.

"Desperate times call for desperate measures." Aang said simply. "Indeed they do." Kyoshi agreed. Then he took her right hand as Kyoshi took the other. "Come, Korra. It is far from over." They walked forward simultaneously, pulling her with them.

Her heart jumped again in her chest. Far from over, he said. She chanced a glance, flitting in between her two predecessors. Something warned her though, not to get her hopes up so naively like she had done the first time around.

They walked, the three of them, as the world warped and churned and transformed. The ground swallowed Yakone. Republic City became something else. A long corridor stretched out into the distance, endlessly undulating into an empty space.

"Do you know the meaning of the word Avatar, Korra?"

She looked up, unsure which one had asked.

"The true word is Avatāra. It means to cross over, to descend, in the ancient Sanskrit script." It was Kyoshi who answered.

"… I've never heard of that before."

"You wouldn't. It is a dead language. It has been for thousands of years. You only hear the sounds of its children now, in the dialects of the four nations." There was a wistful note in Kyoshi's voice. "The Avatar once meant something different but time has changed its meaning, distorted it. The people now see the Avatar as simply a bender, the ultimate bender, but we were once far more than that. As with energybending, the true might of the Avatar has been forgotten… not only by our people, but by ourselves."

Kyoshi eyed Korra as she said the next sentence. "We have forgotten who we were."

Korra recoiled under Kyoshi's gaze. She knew she was bad with all these spiritual things. No one needed to remind her of that, least of all her past life.

"It is no fault of ours." Aang came to her rescue, directing her gaze away from Kyoshi with a gentle tug. "We have lived many lives, wearing the thousand faces of humanity. It is inevitable that we forget." She flashed him a weak smile in thanks. Always count on Aang to come to her rescue. She can see from which side of the family Tenzin had gotten his groove from. Then she noticed something else.

Pale blue light crept along the wall of the darkened corridor and Korra saw for the first time the rows of statues on both sides. Stone people, men and women, old and young stood tall, erect, staring at her with glowing eyes. The Avatars of the past. Korra drew a nervous breath. There must have been thousands of statues, standing in lines as endless as this corridor. She had never seen so many before.

"The ravages of war have robbed us of our knowledge. The Fire Nation feared the power of the Avatar and in curbing their fear, they destroyed all recordings and written knowledge of the Avatar cycle they managed to get their hands on during the hundred year war. I too was ignorant for much of my life. For a long time, I too did not know what being the Avatar meant."

It was extremely reassuring to hear the man, the Avatar, whose deeds she had heard about and looked up to all her life, made this confession, to know that she was not the only one feeling lost and unsure of herself at times. Still, that did not answer the one question she had asked from the beginning.

"Where are we going?" She peered into the unfathomable depth of the hallway, feeling the pull of excitement and nervousness both in her chest and in the prickling of her skin.

"To the beginning."

"Yeah, I got that the first time. The beginning of what?"

She skidded to a halt as both Aang and Kyoshi turned to face her. The hallway ended all of a sudden with the appearance of a nondescript door. Nervousness jumped in her chest, dealing a mortal blow to excitement.

"The beginning…" Aang and Kyoshi said at the same time, voices twining like bells and drums in an ancient and primordial hymn she had heard long ago but could not remember clearly. "… of the Avatar."

"… what do you mean…" They laid their hands on the door and cut her off mid-question, and pushed. The door yielded under their combined force, opening. And what it opened to wasn't something Korra could describe with a few words.

There was a sea. There was the sky. There was land, somewhere in the peripheral of her vision, and a vast expanse of space. The door opened amidst the skies, like a scene out of a bad dream in which Korra was going to plummet to her death in the next second or two. The visceral sensation of falling lanced through her like a spear and she very nearly screamed when a hand gripped her across her stomach, pulling her backward.

"Steady."

"Wha… what is this? Where is this?" She breathed through her mouth, puffing out heavy pockets of air, tasting salty sweat on her tongue. She had both arms around the other two older Avatars. The incredible vistas of the ocean below pulled her gaze in and kept it captive in the dark depth beneath the roiling waves. She could hear the water, pulling, pushing, and felt the cold moisture of humid air on her face. If this was a memory, then it was the most life-like she had ever experienced.

"The beginning." Kyoshi reiterated, keeping one hand around Korra's waist and her other hand gripping the door lining. Held like this between them, Korra could have sworn they were just as fleshly and living as her. She released a nervous laugh, her anxiety reaching an uncomfortable peak. The worst case of MPD. Ever.

"They're coming." She heard from one of the two Avatars. They who?

The answer to her question appeared scant seconds later. Something was moving in the black depth. Something big, big enough to make her step back instinctively, cowed by its sheer size and implied danger on a subconscious level.

It was a tree that first broke the water surface, dripping heavily, then a forest, then what looked like a small island. Two nervous frantic heartbeats later, the thing emerged entirely… no. Not entirely, more like half. But only even a half was more than enough.

"A lion turtle?" She breathed disbelievingly.

"The lion turtle." Aang corrected. "The oldest and most powerful being of the planet, also my energybending master."

Korra perked up. So _that_ was how Aang learned energybending. Energybending, the mysterious epitome of all bending arts. In no documents was its origin and method of teaching ever recorded. The one mystery of Avatar Aang - from whom did he learn this bending art? - that was never explained, not even to Aang's friends and family.

"Is it…" She started only to be shushed by Aang. "Quiet. Listen."

…_going to teach me to energybend?_ Korra finished in her head, making a face as she did so. The next second, she schooled herself. Something was happening down below.

The Lion Turtle moved and a humongous paw the size of two buildings combined bobbed up and down on the waves. Korra leaned in. There was a figure perching haphazardly on it, facing the Lion Turtle. A tiny fleck of white robe and long dark hair in the brown expanse of the Lion Turtle's paw.

Before she could so much as open her mouth to voice another question, the Lion Turtle opened its and out came something that couldn't really be called a voice.

"Do you know what will happen?" It spoke in a language she shouldn't be able to understand but somehow understood anyway. She had a split second in which she contemplated whether this was the dead Sanskrit Kyoshi was talking about when all of a sudden, Korra was not peeking out from a sub-space corridor, sandwiched between two older Avatars, but standing on top of the Lion Turtle's paw, eye-to-eye with a lion face so big it blocked out the skies. She felt the almost familiar awkwardness of a body she wasn't used to, eyeing white robes that she shouldn't be wearing and free dark hair that she shouldn't have flying in the wind.

"You shall be born to face the shadow." The Lion Turtle's words rumbled in her hearts, filling her eardrums and her veins like thunders. "Born once more as you were born before, and shall be born again, time without end. The Avatāra shall be reborn, and people will both weep in terror and rejoice at your birth, for in the flesh you wear resides the soul of a God and this God is neither gentle nor merciful. There will be those who stand in your way, yet more will lie down and give their life to pave your road. It is the way of the human heart to hold both shadows and light. You will stand at the crossroad and choose, and choose again and again for each time your soul wakes in a new face."

"My friend." Korra buckled under the gaze of the Lion Turtle, her heart beating frantically under its weight. "Do you comprehend the price?"

Korra felt her mouth opened involuntarily and the beginning of a 'I do' formed in her belly, floated up her throat, filled her breath, and was on the verge of escaping into sounds when she was pulled back mercilessly.

The next thing she knew, she was lying on her back, staring at a dark stone ceiling. The sound of a door slamming shut cracked painfully in her ears, sending echoes down the corridor. She sat up, desperately trying and failing to stop the tremors quaking through her body.

"What… what was that?"

"A memory of ours…" Said Aang. "… from our very first mortal life."

Korra gawked for a full ten minutes, during which her mind struggled to come to terms to what she had just seen. She licked her cracking-dried lips and let her question slip out from her mouth.

"Wh… why… did you show it to me?" She felt nervous. She felt like a kid who'd just stumbled her way into something way over her head. She might have lost three of her bending, but as far she could guess (and she fancied she guessed correctly), restoring her bending shouldn't involve showing a memory like this to her… right?

In place of an answer, Kyoshi pushed her hand against the right wall and a door materialized from the stone, then opened.

The sensation was different this time. She wasn't looking through someone else's eyes but flying and looking down through a bird's eye view. The world she saw was not a pretty one. She saw people fighting, walls being built around cities and armies tearing down walls. The skies were filled with airplanes bearing a symbol she had come to fear and hate. The Equalist symbol. The United Force Battle Ship covered part of the sea. People killing. People dying. Benders and non-benders alike. A child crying in the night, lost and alone, huddling against the broken and burned down wall of his house. The skies darkened. Ash fell. The world burned, and she was nowhere to be seen.

Kyoshi closed the door and it was over. The silence in the hallway was almost too much to bear.

"That's not possible." She said after a couple of shaky breaths, petulant as a spoiled child who didn't get the birthday gift she wanted. "Amon is gone. He turned tail and ran. I beat him. I won. I showed the world the fraud and liar he is. I won!"

"Is it?" Kyoshi arched an eyebrow, then she leaned down so close the top of nose almost touched Korra's. "You won. Really?" Korra turned her head, planning to rope Aang into taking her side, but Kyoshi gripped her face with a hand and killed that plan right off the bat. "You can lie to just about anybody, but not yourself, Avatāra. I have seen your heart, and it is filled with '_him_'" Korra struggled, feeling a feverous blush erupting on her face. She wanted out, right now. Her past life or not, she wanted as far away from Kyoshi as possible, but the older Avatar was relentless, and possessing of a strength verging on supernatural. "It is his shape you see in the dark. It is his voice you hear in your sleep. Your skin remembers his touch. Here…" Kyoshi's hand moved to her chest, directly above her frantically drumming heart. "… and here." Then her forehead. "He haunts you, even now. You fear him and because of your fear, he is alive still, even if it is only in you, through you."

Her point made, Kyoshi released her. She stumbled back, down on her haunches, angry, frustrated and ashamed. She turned to Aang, expecting to find comfort but got something else.

"You can't solve every problem by head-butting it and throwing it out the window, Korra. Amon is simply a symptom, a symptom and a catalyst. Even with him removed, the conflict between benders and non-benders is still there as you have done little to address it. There is more to being the Avatar than just fisticuffs and bending your way out of your troubles."

"Then tell me what to do? What do I have to do?" … _to get my bending back?_ She completed the line in her head, her anger and frustration simmering.

This time, it was Aang who opened a door from the left-side wall. Korra was quickly getting tired of doors in general but she inched closer, peeking warily. On the other side was a snowbound landscape achingly similar to her home. Arctic wind came in through the door, blowing in her face a familiar plethora of snowflakes, ice-drops and the tangy scents of high-altitude ozone that could only come from a Water Tribe territory.

"Where is this?" She pushed her question, shouting it through the sound of the wind.

"Amon's childhood home." Aang replied succinctly.

"The Northern Water Tribe?"

"Twenty-six years ago."

She gawked openly, incredulous. Aang cracked a smile at her face, his Air Nomad nature breaking through his solemn expression. "The power of the Avatar is immeasurable, but can only be called on in time of need, as I called on Energybending."

Oh, right. Of course. Physical god and all associated baggage. How could she forget that?

"Alright, what do I do?"

"Make a choice, as I made mine." Aang replied, sounding as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. Then, in a completely unexpected move, he shoved her out the door. It was her only reflex that saved her from the fall. _'What?'_ She gripped onto the doorframe with both hands and feet, staring open-mouth at a completely unapologetic Aang. In the next second, before she could react, Kyoshi took Aang's place and the voice that came out of her mouth was Korra's own, completed with mocking sarcasm.

"Don't be a wuss, Korra…" She said. "… you want your bending back, you have to earn it." And sent her falling with a kick.

* * *

**End Chapter 1.**

* * *

And Korra's last thought before everything went black was 'I have the worst case of MPD ever!' Really, did anybody stop and think about the case of the Avatar's multiple personality disorder? For a single soul, h/she sure has many facets, some completely at odd with each other.

Weird beginning, but yeah. My Amorra fixation is not going away… not going away… not going away.

This will start out bleak, but it will be mostly a story about learning something new… and rebellious teenage love (in which Korra at first tries to murder Noatak (unsuccessfully) and he becomes kinda fascinated then smitten with her).

Me being the bona fide Asian living in Asia that I am (and a Wuxia fan), these are the things I want to do in this fic: Korra learning Airbending and its sub-skills (sound bending, an atmospheric counterpart of Toph's seismic sense, a mild form of emotion manipulation via sound waves), Korra learning the martial art form of energybending (which is called qicong in the Wuxia genre Atla and LoK draw heavily from)

Also… Yakone… for such a bad guy, why do you have such good genes? Your sons are a menace to ovaries everywhere on the planet.


	2. Chapter 2

Disclaimer: I do not own Legend of Korra and its characters.

_**Book Air**_

Premise: To regain her bending, Korra must make a choice, go back to the past and either kill a teenage Noatak, or save him. But things are never as simple as they appear to be.

**Chapter 2**:The Fall

* * *

'Airbend!' That was the only thought in Korra's head, the only coherent thought amidst a string of curses and the virulent flare of commingled shock, panic, and indignation from being given the boot by one's past self. 'Airbend! Or you will die!'

She was dropping like a rock, racing vertically through puffs of cloud, spiraling wildly downward. And the fact that two minutes in, she had yet to see the ground was something she would be worrying about if she still had the appropriate brain capacity to do so, but as it was, her mind was wholly dedicated to the task of deliriously panicking at the time.

With herculean effort, she pressed down on the paralyzing terror racing through her veins and tried to summon the basic kata of Airbending from her head, twisting her body to the appropriate form and holding her hand just so, desperately trying to envision the famed Air Scooter. The panic and the impending doom of ending as a big splatter on the ground combined put a mental force the size of Aang's air temple island on her mind. She flexed her hands, expecting waves of typhoons to appear.

A small, pathetic-looking puff of air escaped from between her fingers.

"… you've gotta be kidding me."

She whipped her arms angrily, chopping the wind with her hands. Nothing came out this time. She opened her mouth, a volley of curses on the tip of her tongue, then she saw it. The ground, the vast expanse of the Northern tundra, a blanket of white in an even vaster canvas of deep blue sea, all quickly approaching like a giant ice-capped bullet.

'Not good.' zipped through her head with the speed of lightning before she abandoned all semblance of the graceful Airbending forms and took to beating her arms violently, hoping to force something from her sheer desperation alone, anything.

She was going fast, faster, plummeting with a dizzying speed, the air in her lung pressed to a tiny pulp under the pressure of her fall. From this height she could see that she was going to hit the sea, but even that meant next to nothing. Having been dropkicked from that kind of height, even a water landing would render into broken pieces.

'Great plan, Kyoshi! Let's just drop the Avatar from fifty thousand feet up the air and see if she's worthy.' She screamed in her mind, kicking her legs and thrashing her arms. The canvas of blue below was coming closer, closer, then came a breathless moment when she finally lost the last semblance of control and her terror, now free from her mental grip, let loose in a blood-curling scream.

She hit water, her scream stopped in its infancy, ruthlessly cut off mid-syllable.

The world simultaneously exploded and imploded. A miniature Super nova flashed right into her eyes, unbearably, blindingly bright, before being swallowed whole by an all-encompassing darkness. She heard the cracks of bubbles in her ears and dimly realized she was bleeding. The abrupt change of atmospheric pressure must have busted a vein somewhere inside. The shock and pain momentarily suppressed the freezing cold.

Korra spent the next few seconds floating dazedly in limbo, her body not yet caught up, not yet registering where it was. Then they passed and she felt the weight of a very different force, that of several billion metric tons of water, all pressing down on her. Her last puff of air slipped out from her lungs and the next sensation she felt was the burn of seawater in her throat.

'Move.' The tiny part of her mind that had survived the fall roared through a layer of thick gauze. 'Swim.' Miraculously, her body obeyed, moving sluggishly. The moves they performed, though, were not the motion of swimming, but of waterbending. Reduced to its most vulnerable state, her body could only remember the most familiar of movements. So instead of moving up, Korra spun lazily in an underwater pantomime of waterbending, helplessly held in the blue depth of the Northern Sea, not really moving anywhere. Her mind struggled to command her body in a different direction, but it only took a few seconds more for the lack of air to get to her. In no time at all, black spots appeared in her vision and overtook everything.

* * *

On the evening when the son of Kyneoa and Inanna trudged back to Emeq from his hunt, a small ruckus happened in which nearly all the inhabitants of the village, the children and women, gathered at the village entrance to watch the boy wrestle with the cloud of water trailing slowly behind him.

The bubble of water, about the size of a full-grown Buffalo Yak, floated lazily after the boy, an almost perfect oval shape if not for the minute ripples along its edges. Inside it lay the prone body of an unconscious girl. Water covered her from her neck to her toe, leaving only part of her face bobbing on the surface.

When the boy reached the square that served as the village center, the chief of Emeq broke through the throngs of gawking and whispering women and children, panting slightly from the brief run he'd had to make from the hunter's hut to the square.

"Noatak? What is this? Who is this? Where did you…" He paused for a breath, and with one flick of his hand, brought the tail edge of his coat up to dab at the sweat gathering at his brow. His age clearly disagreed with free sprinting through three slopes of snow hill in between the hut and the square.

The boy looked up at him, then spoke in a tone and surety that could easily have belonged to someone ten years his senior. "I don't know. I found her off the North Coast, in the water. I don't know who she is, but we won't find out if we don't get her the healer's tent fast." He gestured to the water bubble, which was slowly but steadily deepening into a dark purple. Blood, the chief realized as he eyed the tendrils and clouds of purple spreading quickly like the marks of disease inside the water bubble. The girl was bleeding, and not in any small amount either.

"Get Kaya." He barked to the line of women behind him. That turned out to be unnecessary as a mere second after his command, the throng broke again and out walked Kaya, the village's healer for forty-five years running. Without even a glance at the chief, the old woman bent down for a closer look at the girl. The water bubble covered everything except for the girl's face, but for a healer of Kaya's experience, sight was unneeded to ascertain the physical state of her patient.

It took a split second for her to assess everything and made a decision. She glanced at the boy, straightening herself. "We won't get anything done standing here. Quick, child! Get her to my tent." And only then did she turn to the chief with a pointed look. "And you…" She said, looking from between the chief and the gawking crowd behind him. Emeq was only one among the thousands of the Northern Water Tribe Capital City satellites, and one of the smaller one at that. Though it had, in the past, been a popular through-town preferred by religious pilgrims, its position, being too far off the current trade routes, guaranteed a slim through traffic these days.

In other words, nothing much ever happened in Emeq, and when something did happen, the whole village knew, and at least half of them would like their noses buried deep in that particular happening… which was definitely not a good thing now. Not for Kaya, and definitely not for this girl who just happened to be the hot news of the month.

"You… you do what you're supposed to do chief, and give me my physician's space."

"What? You want me to stand between you and ten dozens curious women?" He gestured between Kaya and the villagers behind him, eyes wide.

"I want you to get your spine out of your purse and be the village chief for real if only for ten minutes… and to not have my windows filled with peeping faces as I tend to this girl. A few housewives can't be that intimidating, can they? Or have the old wolf of Emeq coast grew old and feeble after all?" She said archly before turning on her heels and running after Inanna's eldest son, leaving a sputtering village chief behind her.

A quick walk and some shuffling through the snow later, Kaya was back in her healer's tent. She turned with one swift move, closed, then locked the door behind her, before moving to do the same with the flap-skin windows of her tent.

When she finally turned back, Noatak was standing in the middle of the room, alternating between watching her and the unconscious girl.

Without saying a word, she went to the back and pulled out make-shift stretcher usually reserved for the worst of patients. "Put her here, gently." Then she watched the boy moved in that eternal and graceful dance taught to all the male waterbenders of the Northern Land.

The water shifted under the slightest turn of the boy's hand, settling the girl onto Kaya's stretcher. Her back was the first thing to land, followed by her head, settled with such care that Kaya could see not even the tiniest unwilled disturbance in the water, then her hands, neatly to her side, and lastly, her legs.

Then the water withdrew entirely and Kaya moved in for the kill.

Broken bones. She noted at once without even touching anything. Forty-five years in service had granted her the ability to rattle off her patient's injuries from first look, an ability which Kaya didn't always appreciate. Too many bad things to see, sometimes it felt like all the world had to offer was people hurting, people dying. However, upon her second look, she revised her opinion. Shattered. The bones weren't broken, they were shattered. No ordinary broken scaphoid could turn up that kind of bruises. A badly damaged pelvis. Fractures along the arms and legs. The degree of visible damage alone had Kaya cringing in sympathetic pain. No wonder Noatak had taken her back in a water pocket, anything else and she would have died from having fragments of her bones going everywhere and tearing her internal organs to shreds. A painful death, if there ever was one.

"What happened to you, child?" She couldn't help but whisper. Not even in war times had she encountered patients like this, and she had had people falling off of cliffs before, falling off of cliffs and onto ice landing. None of them even came close to this girl. The fact that she was somehow still alive was a miracle in and of itself.

"She fell… from the skies." Noatak interjected, his young voice showing a rare moment of hesitation. His face was reflected in the many mirrors she kept on the wall of her tent, gaze lingering with childish wonder on the unconscious girl, as if he couldn't quite believe it himself. The moment didn't last long, because in the next second, Noatak snapped back to his usual polite but detached demeanor.

"If I hadn't waterbent the patch of sea she fell into, there probably wouldn't have been a lot of her left to collect now." He spoke with a stiff voice, as if embarrassed by his earlier hesitation.

Kaya stifled a laugh despite herself. 'Have we grown fond of the new girl now, Noatak?' Came the thought in her head, full of old woman's humor 'And here I thought all the young girls of the village were right, that you are as much an ice block as your waterbending.' But Kaya shook herself. No time. Humor later. She had a girl to save now.

"Fell from the skies you said. That would explain her bleeding ears." Velocity shock, coupled with barotraumas. Usually found in deep-sea divers who had foregone safety rules and resurfaced too fast for their bodies to adapt. This would be the first time Kaya found it from the opposite direction. Falling too fast through too many atmospheric levels that the body just can't keep up…. Which begged the question of just exactly how far up did she fall? Judging from the aftermaths the dive left on her body, Kaya overruled all the cliffs around the North Coast area. This girl definitely did not slip off from anywhere inland.

Could it… Kaya paused momentarily, recalling the Fire Nation airships menacing the border of North Water Tribe many years ago, when Kaya herself was a little girl. Yes, a fall from one of those ships could surely leave such injuries, but the war had ended many years ago and the subsequent truce had required the dismantling of all Fire Nation airships…. and this girl was obviously a Water Tribe member. Everything from her clothing to her appearance bore the touches of the people of the sea and the moon. A Water Tribe girl falling from a Fire Nation ship that wasn't supposed to exist anymore. The thought sounded impossible in her head, yet it was the only logical explanation thus far available to Kaya.

A Water Tribe girl on a Fire Nation war ship. What could that possibly mean?

Kaya wiped the thought from her head with a ruthlessness born of decades of tending to the sick and the dying. Heal now. Questions later. She redirected her full focus on the nameless girl, inspecting the damages in deeper levels.

The light from Kaya's oil lamp flickered on the girl's body, reflecting pinpricks of red ice.

"You stemmed her blood? With ice?" She asked without looking, a hint of amazement leaking into her voice. That was some ingenious use of waterbending.

"She would have bled to death if I didn't. It's a long way from the North Coast."

Kaya laid a hand on the girl's head, touching her for the first time. She expected to feel the burn and rigidity of frostbitten skin based on the girl's pale face, a sure sign of the early stages of hypothermia setting in. The skin under her fingers, however, was soft and warm to the touch.

"I kept the water warm around the ice." Inanna's son explained before she could even think to phrase her question. She arched one eyebrow, a mixture of amazement and pride peeking from her face. So that was why Noatak was struggling as he walked into the village. He'd had to maintain a relatively still bubble of water around the girl to preserve her delicate bones, freeze bits of ice around her bleeding wounds and still keep the water surrounding warm to offset her earlier dip in the arctic sea. Ah, Noatak, ever the waterbending prodigy of Emeq. Let it never be said that a child from two non-benders can't be a hell of a one, and let it never be said that true mastery of waterbending can't be taught to said child by his own non-bender father.

Kyneoa should be proud of his eldest son, proud instead of haranguing the poor child and his little brother for every perceived imperfection in their daily waterbending practices. Kaya would like to give the man a piece of her mind one day, but other people's child rearing practices weren't strictly a healer's business, so once again, she wiped her mind clean of thoughts and concentrate on the task at hand.

"We begin now. I will have to cut off her clothes. You know what to do." She started, not moving an inch from her sitting position in front of the girl. She wouldn't need to. The things that followed were a secret kept between Kaya and this child.

Noatak stood up, pried the prize of his hunt off his belt, a couple of fresh-caught Blue Koi, quickly encased them in ice cubes and set them beside the door. Next, he pulled out a wood-framed seal-skin screen from the wall of her tent and positioned it so that he was on one side while Kaya and the girl were on the other. Then he sat down and waited for her direction.

On her side of the screen and away from the boy's eyes, Kaya picked up a physician's knife and set to slicing the girl's shirt open. The blue cloth came apart easily under the cast steel of her knife, slick with blood in some spots. Next came the traditional Sarashi binding the girl's chest. She cut the Sarashi to shreds before pulling them off one by one, taking great care to be as gentle as possible. In this kind of case, the torso always required the most delicate of touch. Too many important organs, too fragile. And with the nameless girl's outside condition, Kaya wouldn't be surprised to reach inside with her bender's sense only find her internal organs already smashed to bits and drowned in internal hemorrhage. In fact, she expected it, which made it even harder work.

In two minutes, Kaya made quick works of the girl's pants and arm-wraps before pulling her soaking wet underwear off in one quick move.

"We will first mend her bone frame."

Noatak's shadow on the screen moved, holding out his hands in a classic healer's position. Kaya watched the absolute poise and grace of his movements with something like awe. It was moments like these and prodigies like Noatak that made her curse the age-old tradition of male warriors and female healers only. The hundred year war was now a thing of the past. The age of constant warring was no more, and now that the tribe was focusing on rebuilding their past glories, they needed healers more than warriors. Or at least, Emeq needed one more healer and one less boomerang-chucking, sword-swinging brute of a brat… in Kaya's opinion. If it weren't for that long outdated rule, Noatak would have made a fine healer, one with the potential of far surpassing master Katara of the South.

With the force of more than four decades of experience, Kaya spread her senses wide, covering the room with her water consciousness. She closed her eyes, and another vision opened up in her head. She was aware of all water in the room. The water in her basin, the soup in her cauldron, already growing overcooked (blasted! There went her dinner, all that fine otto-seal, wasted!), the ice cubes in which Noatak kept his fishes, the water inside her own body, the water in the nameless girl's body, a jagged river full of violent waterfalls and rock bed, roaring ferociously in some places and mewling pathetically in others, an acute representation of her severe injuries; the water in Noatak's body, so calm, so still, yet hiding whirlpools he'd hidden, secrets of the domestic kind which Kaya knew about but was merciful enough to pretend not to.

Kaya did nothing, only watched over the distinct tendrils of Noatak's waterbending curling around the girl, pooling into the cracks of her bones to begin the process of healing. As always, the feel of another waterbender's bending drew her in, taunted her, and Kaya wanted nothing more than to throw in her own bending, once touted as the best of the North forty years ago … but she resisted, gripping her hands together to keep them from assuming the forms she'd used so many times it became second-nature, to the point that Kaya could do them even in her sleep. Ah, what would it feel like to finally be allowed to bend again? To feel the cool water twisting like fine silk beneath her hands… but no.

Years ago, she had made a vow and foreswore her bending altogether. With the help of Noatak, she had kept this vow a secret from her whole village, with him doing the real bending and her as the teacher and the guide. They'd done this a hundred times before, for various people of the village. And this girl, no matter her circumstance or the degree of her injuries, would not change the one fact that Kaya would not bend, from here to the end of her life.

"Steaaady." She directed. On the other side of the screen, Noatak slowed the movements of his hands. "Hold her, Noatak. Gently, but firmly. You don't want to squeeze anything too delicate. Girls are delicate, so be gentle. We wouldn't want her to wake up because of your rough waterbending on her body and slap you for it now, would we?" A smile kicked up the corner of her mouth when she saw Noatak's shadow stiffened momentarily on the seal-skin screen.

_Ah, boys will be boys after all. _

Emeq was an aging village, with too many old and middle-age, and not nearly enough young. Noatak and his brother were among the precious few children left in her village. The older, in their seventeen or eighteen, had gone to the South, gone after the call of Republic City, chasing their fancy dreams of a life of riches and free opportunities, leaving villages like Emeq a bit emptier, a bit hollower, a bit older. So, despite the fact that they had done this a hundred times before, this would be the first Noatak applied his bending on a girl his age… and a pretty one to boot.

"Now, we will normalize the pressure in her head. Delicate touches, Noatak, delicate touches." She said the moment the girl's bone frames were corrected and all the bone fragments pulled out of her internal organs. A metal tray Kaya had set aside was filling up with pieces of bone too small to mend back without taking up too much of their time. Gradually, the girl's breathing, which was a weak and unsteady hiss before, regained a normal pace, and her ears and nose stopped bleeding. Good. Kaya observed. Very good. With many long, smooth strokes of his hands, Noatak unblock and calmed the flow of blood in her head, until they regained their normal rhythm.

"Hemorrhage in her chest cavity. We will drain out the blood and mend her internal organs. Are you up for it?" She asked, wiping a bead of sweat from her brow. Here was the hardest part, long and requiring utmost concentration from the healer. While the brain was much more critical, healing the chest cavity and its internal organs were far more drawn-out, with some cases taking hours just to stabilize the patient. Without good pacing, a healer may find herself running dry on stamina and forced to end the healing process, leaving the patient hanging in an extremely dangerous condition, and this girl's condition was looking more and more like it would be among those special cases. Despite the fact that Noatak was the acknowledged best waterbender of Emeq, Kaya needed to know if he was prepared for this one. The process of healing, once began, should not be stopped.

"I'm good." He replied.

"Then let's do it." Said Kaya, without thinking of questioning the boy a second time. At fourteen years old, Noatak had proved himself far more reliable than a good deal of adults in the village. Kaya knew without a doubt that he wouldn't say yes if he wasn't up to it.

The process did take up a good two hours, during which she directed Noatak in cleaning out the blood, which was in the process of rotting and contaminating the girl's insides, mending the busted veins and arteries, and soothing tissue trauma left from the fall. Noatak was in the middle of mending a hepatic tear along the girl's ligamentum teres when a loud knock on Kaya's door jolted through the silence of her tent.

"Brother!" A voice came in through the door. "Dad says it's late and you have to go back for training. And mom says everyone's eaten without you so come home before dinner is cold. And Hassuq says Kaya should hurry up because he's not gonna be her guard all night."

"Tarrlok." Noatak muttered through the screen, not stopping the motions of his hands. "What should we do?"

Kaya stood up, went to one of her windows, then opened the flap. It was dark outside. The vistas of Emeq through her window was a blanket of deep blue and purple, dotted with blurs of orange and yellow fire. Up above, she saw a veil of night mist thickening into milky white. The whole village was going to bed.

"Noatak, it's cold out here. Come on. I wanna go home." Tarrlok called again from outside the door, on the verge of whining.

"Just a minute. I'm coming." Noatak yelled at the door before looking back at Kaya, eyes imploring.

"It's late. He's right. You should go. We can continue tomorrow."

"But…" Kaya's new position offered her full view on both sides of the screen, and from this new perspective, she watched Noatak glance at the other side where the girl lay unconscious, an uncharacteristic hint of worry on his face.

"She's stable. The critical state has passed. You did good. I'll take care of the rest."

"… She doesn't feel good." Said Noatak, a frown marring his face.

Kaya smiled at his remark. Fourteen years old and the child had already developed a fine waterbender sense. Ah, if only… She stopped the thought right there.

"Of course she doesn't. Her injuries aren't like the ones we have treated so far. We will need to tend to her for many days until she's back on her feet."

"… if you say so." Noatak said after a full minute of silence during which he looked between Kaya and the screen, making up his mind. He stood up, bid her goodnight and headed for the door. His little brother greeted him on the other side with a whine and a grimace before promptly launching into a mini rant. "Do you know how late it is? Everyone was waiting for you to come home for dinner. And do you know how mom looked when Hassuq told her you'd gone to Kaya and left him in the middle of the village. She thought you fell down the ice in the hunting ground or the otter-fishes swallowed you on accidents. And did you even bring anything back from your hunt. I don't want to have turtle seal for dinner tomorrow, and tomorrow's morrow, and tomorrow's morrow's morrow. Oh and dad is so going to chew you out for this. You just missed training."

Noatak promptly shoved the ice-cubed fishes into his younger brother's arm to stop his ranting and together they walked home, bantering back and forth all the way.

Kaya watched the boy with a half-smile on her face, then she closed the door, tied up her window flaps and went back to the girl. The wood was nearly gone in her fireplace and her tent was getting colder by the minute. She'd have to go out for a refill in a moment or so. But now though…

Kaya kneeled before the nameless girl, brushed the stray lock of hair from her pale face and took a good long look. Dark hair, honey-colored skin, a Water Tribe girl through and through, she couldn't be a day over seventeen. She had the look of a child from a well-off family. Kaya had seen the egg-sized stone sewn into her parka. Real precious stone instead of the ice balls and bird feathers favored by more middle-class Water Tribe families. The kind of stone that would fetch a good amount from merchants. And the threads of her under-clothes and her arm-wraps were all silk, not cotton or wool as usual but silk, even the underlining of her shirt. In the North Pole, only particularly well-off families could afford to flaunt their wealth so openly like that, families with well-known names and long history to do with the tribe. With the Water People's just-enough philosophy, such families were few and far in between, and very rarely did they allow a child of theirs to wander to backwater places like Emeq.

So what was a girl like her doing in a place like this? Out in the ice, alone, in one of the harshest place of the North Pole, with nothing on her but her clothes, and very ill-fitting clothes for the local weather at that. Why, that parka of her would barely serve an Emeq winter, maybe a normal central North Pole winter, but definitely not Emeq with its famous ice storms that could last for months and burry everything in miles of snow.

Kaya pressed a finger on the girl's forehead and willed her water sense deeper, deeper through the layers of hurt and panic and injuries, down to a level where Kaya could read directly from her chi. The girl was a bender, Kaya found, an extremely powerful one at that. She blinked as the next second she felt the burn of fire, the rumble of earth, and the cool flow of water all at once, and something else, something that she had never felt before, something blowing, and howling, and so absolutely intangible it left her spinning in its wake. She blinked, confused at what she was feeling. That was supposed to tell her what type of bender the girl was, but that couldn't be right. This girl was a waterbender.

Kaya tilted her head, considering. Perhaps she had gotten into a fight. Sometimes, bending battles between powerful benders could leave an imprint of their spirits in each other's bodies, as she had heard from the tales of old. Benders so powerful spiritually that parts of them leaked out to the outside world. Perhaps this was what happened to this girl. Perhaps she was such a bender. But even that didn't answer much and only put more questions in Kaya's head. She needed something more so once again, she willed herself in deeper, even deeper than before.

A sensation like going into a dark tunnel passed over her, and finally she found what was in the end of the tunnel. Nothing. A deep terrible abyss of nothingness that swallowed her whole. Kaya jerked back with a gasp, her finger where she had touched the girl numb and cold.

"Oh spirits. Oh, my poor child." Kaya panted, shivering violently as she scooted away from the girl for a second. She had felt that terrifying sense of nothingness before, a long time ago, in a memory she didn't want to revisit. To see it again in this girl was not something she expected. "Whatever happened… that took away your bending like that?"

* * *

**End Chapter 2**

* * *

Noatak made his first appearance. Also, baby Tarrlok. And plots!


	3. Chapter 3

Disclaimer: I do not own Legend of Korra and its characters.

_**Book Air**_

Premise: To regain her bending, Korra must make a choice, go back to the past and either kill a teenage Noatak, or save him. But things are never as simple as they appear to be.

**Chapter 3**: The Waking

* * *

In the night following the arrival of the nameless girl, Kaya dug out an old unused journal she'd saved during the year of cheap imported Earth Kingdom hemp paper and opened it with an entry.

_Day one_, she wrote with her charcoal tipped pen, then stopped, momentarily at a loss at what to write. Under the flickering light of her seal oil lamp, she peered at the nameless girl, unconscious on her stretcher, draped under old furs with a barely functioning heat lamp beside her. The parlor of her skin had lost some of its paleness, slowly but surely gaining back a healthy undertone, which only spoke of Noatak's skill at waterbending. Still, Kaya could already see the signs of the early onset of hypothermia showing (which reminded her she needed to get a better heat lamp or risk lung inflammation due to hypothermia complications on the girl). Noatak may have been good, but preventing temperature shock, which would have killed the girl out right, was already a feat in and of itself. They'll just have to deal with the hypothermia as it came.

The stretcher the girl lay on made for a bad bed, she noted, which would undoubtedly give her a case of muscle sores in the morning and atrophy within a week or so. It had only served as an emergency medical table so far, and not at all appropriate for prolonged use of any sorts. Kaya would need to get a proper bed if she was going to have this nameless patient in her house for the long run… and it was looking more and more to be the case.

_Day One_. She went back to her journal. _Patient… unknown. Young female. Age sixteen to nineteen. Appear to be of Water Tribe descent. Heavy injuries…_

"By Asherat!" She cursed and stopped again. It had been a very long time since the last time she'd ever made a journal like this. "Why do I even bother?" It wasn't like Kaya needed words down on paper to remember how many bones were broken in her body and just where exactly she would need to apply salve to in the morning. It wasn't like Kaya had patients so seriously injured this frequently anyway. The last case had been an old hunter who had slipped down from the caribou track on the side of the mountain and broke a leg and an arm. There were also the usual illnesses and such from the elders of Emeq and its sister villages along the coast. But other than that, nothing special, nothing extraordinary, nothing that could contend with this girl for Kaya's attention.

Kaya turned back, her nerves all jittery. With some reluctance, she extended her waterbending sense, enveloping the girl in her healer's awareness. Stable. Her sense told her. Over all bad shape but the critical state had passed. In the silence of her tent, Kaya listened to the wet rasp of the nameless girl's erratic breath. They had healed the punctures in her lungs, but only barely, only so that she would survive the night under Kaya's vigil. And in the morning there would be Noatak and his prodigious waterbending, Noatak who had covered for Kaya since the day he figured out the bones in her closet, her big secret.

The moisture in the air sang so sweetly to her, its voice that of an old friend. Her fingers itched. If only she would extend more of her, the water in the air told her, if only she would _bend_, she could erase the injuries on this girl in the blink of an eye. Noatak may have been a prodigy, but he was a child still, and his newly budding talent paled in the light of her decades of experience. If only she would bend…

Kaya looked away from the girl and into the darkness of her tent, willing the lamp light to burn her blind, willing the silence to swallow her whole. When she came to, she found she had broken the pen in her grip. She released the pen with a sigh, took out a replacement from the drawer of her work table and started over.

Day One –

1. Her Bending is gone. This is not an assumption on my part. It is fact. It does not matter how many times I touch upon her chi, _that place_ is empty.

2. It does not feel like a normal emptiness. This girl was born a bender, one of rare power. I daresay she might even be on par with Noatak in term of raw power. There's no telling who's the more skilful though. The girl looks to be older than Noatak, perhaps by a few years, so she should be the one with more experience… but he wasn't called a prodigy for nothing. I wonder…

3. Who is she?

4. There is a mark on her chest. The old mark noble lines put on their virgin daughters to warn off potential violation. The virgin's vermillion. So she's not only from a wealthy family but also of noble lines… or the promised wife of a noble line. But what noble would let his daughter go gallivanting off to this part of the North Pole? What kind of noble would even teach his daughter combat bending in the first place?

5. I don't know what to think. Fell down from the skies? I would have thought Noatak was Aurora-blinded if I had not seen for myself the degree of her injuries. The only thing I know that could get a human up that high is the Fire Nation airships… but even that only brings more questions… and gives no answer.

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Day Two –

1. The morning came so slow.

2. I bought the bed… and the extra blankets. The lamp will have to wait though. I'm too short on money now. Kyneoa is not happy with me. Well the man can go suck on a… If he weren't the owner of the only general store this side of the North Pole… and Tarrlok's father, bless his sweet little rascal heart, I would have tried and see how big of an ice pole I can stick down his…

3. Good thing Innana is such a sweetheart. Good thing that her sons take after her rather than their father.

4. I need to board down my windows because I swear this is the last time I'm forced to throw Heiwa and her gossiping daughters outta my tent. I know this village doesn't have much in terms of news but this is just too much. My windows are already collapsing from all the peeking and sneaking around! Don't these people understand that sick people need to rest in peace?!

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Day Four –

1. She still hasn't woken up. I am not surprised though this is worrying none the less. There are marks of a fight going on even before her fall. Combat between benders are nothing to scoff at, and combat between benders strong enough to leave imprints of their bending on her chi even less so. Noatak is worried. He has never had to heal anyone so extensively before, and it shows. I've never seen his bending waver like that before. Or at least… I hope that was because he was unused to such prolonged procedure… I do not like to discuss the going-ons of other families, Asherat knows I hide my own, but there are times…

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_When he saw Kaya pushing apart the flaps of his tent and walked in from the blizzard, bits of ice and the smell of a windy North Pole day in her hair, Hassuq grimaced. _

"_Here for her soup?" He asked and was replied with a curt nod from Kaya. He padded to the back, then returned with a clay pot wrapped in tattered pieces of leather. The soup Kaya wanted, smoking hot and breathing puffs of steam from its lid. Kaya took a good long whiff. A smile broke out on her face and unwound the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. All of a sudden she looked twenty years younger, just like a day long in the past when she'd stood just like this at the parlor of Hassuq's hut, dripping from her coats and making a mess on his floor, crying her heart out and making a mess of Hassuq's insides._

_He harrumphed, breaking that too inappropriate-for-his-age thought._

"_I don't see why grilled Koi or fresh Tiger Seal ain't good enough for that girl. Raw and fresh off the sea cures all your ills. That's what my mam always says." He said as he handed the pot to Kaya. _

"_Unconscious people can't chew, chief. I'm too busy for anything other than dried jerky. You are free all the times and you're the only one in the village who hasn't enough teeth for a normal Water Tribe dinner. It works out for everyone. We all win." She parried, taking the pot from him and leaving payment in his hand. A pot of salve for bone ache._

_What?_

"_Wait a minute! This is not what we agreed on, woman. It was supposed to be iceberry wine. It was supposed to be that iceberry wine vintage you keep under your hut! What do you want me to do with this, woman? My bones ain't got no ache! I'm still young!"_

"_Too young it seems…" She speared him with a stern look usually reserved for the naughtiest of her student. "… to behave as a village chief should. How should I know what you ought to do with it? Use it for your skull. With the rate you knock down the village iceberry wine with, your skull ought to ache something awful. One more bottle chief, and we'll be putting you in your own boat for a one way trip to Asherat of the Sea. Perhaps then you'd finally listen to the village's Angakuit, huh?" Then walked out the door before Hassuq could so much as close his wide-open mouth. _

_Women!_

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2. She is growing thin. Our little sleeping girl. I had Noatak use his waterbending to keep her hydrated (I think he's embarrassed. Probably never had to do it before. How cute.)… but it doesn't help much. The human body needs quite a bit more than water to heal this kind of wounds. Hassuq's clam chowder soup should help. At any rate, it's the only thing I can put down her throat without her choking to death. I can see the musculature of her arms and legs losing definition. For all intents and purpose, she should be awake already. I suspect her injuries from the bending battle went far deeper than I thought. I will need to examine her again.

… I do not enjoy going to _that place_ inside her… the emptiness… it kills the soul. I've gone to _that place_ inside non-benders before, and it has never felt so terrible as _the place_ inside this girl. Still, I am a healer, and healers do not flinch from their patients.

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Day Five –

1. There is something wrong with this girl's bending. I don't… I'm not sure. I must be going daft in my old age, but I could have sworn there is something wrong there. The emptiness is wrong.

2. It is not like I haven't seen people losing their bending before. Of course everyone has heard of the legend of Avatar Aang and Fire Lord Ozai. I would be living under a rock if I didn't know that. But I would be an ignorant if I were to think that was the only way for a person to lose their bending. There are records of war time, when bender soldiers came back without pieces of their bodies, when they came back with minds too broken, when the injuries were too much and their chi paths destroyed. All waterbender healers know that bending is as much an art of the soul as it is an art of the body. If there is damage enough to one, the mind or the body, and the healing process does not begin, the bending wanes… and eventually ceases. I have heard of tales of brutal times during the Hundred Year War where Fire Nation soldiers cut off the arms of Water Tribe prisoners as a precaution in the case that they missed a waterbender among them. Such savagery, yet it worked… as we have seen from the Northern Capital Angakuit's records.

Yet… I detected no such savagery in the ruins of the girl's chi paths. There's no question that someone has tampered with her, ripped her bending from her, but the echoes I found were… elegant… for lack of a better word. This is no crude method employed in times of war, but the fingerprints of a genius, of refined technique executed flawlessly… the scalpel of a surgeon and not the club of a brute. It feels almost…

… like waterbending… the highest order of waterbending… such as I've never seen before…

… I'm not sure what to think of that…

.

.

.

Day Seven –

1. Noatak is early today. It appears Kyneoa will be away on a trading trip soon. It probably is unbecoming for a woman my age to say this… but I can't wait till he's gone. Innana's cooking is legendary and there's only too many lonely evenings an old woman can take before she has to go pay her tribute to Asherat!

2. I caught Tarrlok trying to sneak in for a peek today. Caught him red-handed just as he was about to lift the furs and saw for himself the girl who sent the whole village on a tizzy this last week. And he lied to my face! Said he was trying to help. Said he thought the blankets were choking her, the poor sis!

That little lying devil should have a fine future as a politician if he ever decides to move out of this backwater village. I just hope it won't be in the North Pole. Just what am I going to do when he start passing out laws legalizing sweet-talking women five times older than him and lifting the blankets off my patients?! I hope he goes somewhere else when he finally makes it big. Republic City maybe. Heard it's a big place. If it's as big as they say, it should be able to deal with a politician like a grown-up Tarrlok.

.

.

.

Day Nine –

The girl is awake.

* * *

The process of waking was like putting together a puzzle. In the darkness, Korra connected pieces of lights and colors and sounds, until suddenly she was awake, but only barely.

The first time she woke, the puzzle showed a blurry picture of mixed-up colors and sounds so unclear it felt like she was listening to someone talking through three layers of wall.

"… hear me… hear… can…?" That and a blurry blob of brown, purple and white were all she got before the pounding headache dragged her under.

The second time she woke was somewhat better. She could make out the ceiling of a tent and the smell of something cooking. She tried to sit up. Pain lanced through her and blossomed white flowers in her vision. Distantly, she heard herself groaning.

"Easy, easy now…" A hand appeared under her neck, another on her chest, five fingers splayed in a classic waterbending healer's pose Katara had taught her since her first few lessons. The pain didn't lessen.

"Kaya…" The voice of a boy floated in the air, into her ears and ricocheted all over in her head. She heard the scrapings of things moving on a wood floor. She looked up. The face that blotted out her vision was that of a sixty-something woman, brown and wizened and looking intently at her. A blue blob moved in the corner of her not yet up-to-par vision.

"Sleep." The woman said, drawing Korra's attention back to her. "You are not ready yet. Sleep."

The blue blob moved and this time she felt the familiar sensation of a waterbender working on her body. Sleep came easily this time, soft, and sweet, and swallowing all the pain in its wake.

Korra slept for a long time, floating in the darkness beneath her consciousness. The third time she woke up, it was morning. Sunlight painted an array of glorious red, yellow, and honey on the ceiling and in the air. She sat up, looked around. The room she was in was classic Water Tribe hut… or at least, classic as far as its bare bones were concerned. It was small, and crammed tight with… stuffs… all kinds of stuffs… Korra eyed the wall of the hut, which could barely be seen under a veritable fortress of home-made shelves and bookcases, running from the opening flap at the front of the hut to the back flap in the opposite wall. All kinds of books, scrolls, pots, bottles, and a hundred strange and colorful knickknacks covered the shelves. Cooking pans, clay jars, bowls, basins, kettles and jugs of all types dotted the floor of the hut, which, in a strange turn of events, was made of wood laminate instead of the usual Water-Tribe traditional fur-covered dirt ground. A red thermo sat on a side-table next to her bed, still wet on the outside. Korra's bed itself barely deserved its name. It was more of a fur nest of some sort, with the same outrageous cheap homemade flare spotted on the other furniture, as if someone hadn't had enough money and had instead heaped together a small hill of old leather pieces, animal wools, and furs and christened it a bed. She supposed it was still better than sleeping on the floor.

In one corner, a cauldron bubbled merrily above the burning hearth, funneling the smell of fish chowder into the air. In the center of the room was a … Korra supposed someone would call it a work table… it did kind of look like a work table, one covered under a small mountain of scrolls, straying paper sheets and books opened halfway. Behind the 'table', a screen divider stood in for a board with pieces of paper stuck to its tiger seal skin front. The biggest one had a dark red line on top. _**TO DO LIST**_. It read, in bold, italics, and underlined three times.

1. Clean my hut

2. Clean my table

3. Clean the shelves

4. Cook (at which point Korra noticed the yarn string hanging across the room and the half a dozen dried fishes and caribou jerky on it. They smelt like they might have been made sometimes last year… or perhaps the year before that. She wasn't sure. The funky smell of a hundred pots and bottles on the shelves as well as the cooking cauldron was messing with her head quite a bit)

5. Write the new year's curriculum

6. Wash the girl. She is starting to smell.

7. Get Hassuq to cook for me.

8. Think of a name for the girl. One that doesn't have the word 'girl' in it. Calling her 'the girl' or 'nameless girl' all the times is tiring... even in my head.

9. Get Tarrlok to return my book. Eleven year-olds should not read that kind of book, damn it. (at which point, Korra's mind hadn't recovered enough to recognize the oddly familiar sounding name and let it pass by under the buzzing in her head.)

10. Mix up a new batch of 'Begone, monthly evil!' for Heiwa.

11. Clean my hut

12. Clean my hut

13. Clean my hut

14. Do my to do list

15. Do the laundry

Korra sat there for a while, dazed and confused, and not a clue in her head about where she was. Her body was aching something awful and her mind was a yardful of messed-up yarns. Little thoughts of 'I'm so going to hand it to Kyoshi once I'm back in the Avatar State' swam alongside 'Am I in a witch's hut?' and 'My head hurts. Did a polar bear dog walk over me?' in her head, contending for her attention under the din of her recovering brain. She glared at the To Do List on the screen divider, willing it to answer her questions.

It was at that exact moment that the door flap parted open with a _fwissh_ and in walked a woman. Correction. The woman.

"Oh…" She stopped at the door once she saw Korra. "… you're awake?" Then grimaced. "That was cliché. Of course you are awake, silly me."

"I know you." Korra leaned forward, taking a good long look at the woman. She stood in the doorway, looking back at Korra. The towering columns of piled-up books and cases framing the door made her willowy six-feet-one-and-not-an-inch-of-fat looked short and demure. The veritable forest of pots, pans, flasks, vials, and bric-a-bracs casted a rainbow of shadows on her traditional mud-smeared Water Tribe clothe, making it looked more exotic than it really was. The hair on her head had big white streaks running along her black working-woman single-braid-and-side-loopies do. The tired blue eyes underneath was eyeing Korra with something that flickered back and forth between curiosity and concern. "You were there when I…"

"When you woke up the first time…" The woman cut in. "…and the second time too. That would be because you're in my home." In three long strides, she crossed the distance between the door and the bed, weaving figure S over the jugs and jars to stand before Korra, her bare feet standing out on top a background of bone white wooden floorboard. "Call me Kaya. I'm the acting healer and the Angakuit of this village… or something like that anyway. We aren't very traditional… in the traditional sort of way here." She extended a hand, covered in thin woolen gloves, and touched Korra's forehead.

"Korra." Said Korra, still so drowsy that her name came out sounding more like 'Kowwa'. "Are you a bender?" She followed up suit with a question. Kaya's hand on her forehead, behind a layer of thin wool, didn't look like it was doing at all a good job at feeling up Korra's temperature, but she had heard of waterbender healers doing this before. Or at least, Katara had told her so. One hand on the patient's head to feel the chi flow and all that. It was supposedly an old Northern technique that had fallen into obscurity after Katara fashioned her own far more modern style.

Northern technique… The words pierced the gauze in Korra's head in one swift pinprick. Her memories came back in a flash. She was in the Northern Water Tribe… twenty-six years in the past! The thought alone froze Korra in her track.

Kaya shrugged, non-committal, all the while missing the flickers of shock and disbelief under a layer of exhaustion on Korra's face. "How are you feeling?"

"Like somebody dropkicked me from fifty thousand feet up the air." She deadpanned. A certain someone named Kyoshi from Earth Kingdom who Korra promised to visit retribution upon come the appropriate opportunity.

"As a matter of fact, you did. A boy from the village saw you… falling from the skies…" The look on Kaya's face was one big question mark, and underneath that, suspicion, clear and bright as day.

"I did?" Korra feigned. One month ago, if someone had pitched this same line to her, she would have, no doubt, openly declared herself from the future, sent here by the ghosts of past Avatars, and the Avatar of the future herself. She would have said all that, and would have crossed her arms, proud and expectant. Now though, now… she knew better. Her latest run-in with the Equallists, particularly that time when she had thought yelling Amon's dirty little secret at the top of her lung at an Equallist rally was a good idea, had taught her that even the words of the Avatar were taken with a grain of salt by most people, especially an Avatar-in-training who hadn't exactly been on her best behavior since day one, fresh off the boat and on Republic City land for the first time in her life. In retrospect, it was embarrassing, how she had been so naïve to actually think that would work. People naturally didn't want to hear what they didn't like, what they didn't believe in. Following the same vein of logic, spouting lines like 'Oh you see, I'm from the future. The Avatars of the past sent me here. Don't ask me why they did that. I have no clue either. Avatar's business, you know. All mysterious and illogical and all that mumbo-jumbo spiritual stuff. And by the way, I'm an Avatar too… from the future… from twenty-six years in the future. Capiche?'

That sounded bad even to her ears. That sounded like it had a whopping chance of landing her in a mental institute, bound and gagged and escorted by an entourage of no less than half a dozen orderlies, and an itty-bitty chance of procuring her help from the locals of this time.

Kaya arched an eyebrow, clearly not buying her weak hedge. "I… don't really remember." She tried again, putting on her Ikki-wants-something face. "Everything is… a bit hazy right now."

That did it. She had no idea whether her second try was simply better or Kaya's healer instinct came knocking at the face of a sick person, but the woman relented. She sat down on the floor, right next to her, picked up the red thermo and a bone cup and started pouring. "You look horrible. Drink this." Korra took the cup from her. The liquid inside was honey-colored and steaming hot.

"Honey and ginger. That should help you feel better."

She took a sip, and almost purred as a warm sweetness coated her tongue, slipped down her throat to her belly and heated up everything from the tip of her toe to the top of her head, inflating her like a balloon filled with cee-suddenly-giddy-oh-two. Kaya was putting her wool-covered hands on her throat and her chest, feeling things up in strictly healer's fashion. She didn't mind. The honey ginger had blown a cannon-hole in her wariness wall toward this complete stranger. She hadn't even noticed how bad she was feeling before Kaya and her honey ginger juice made it all better.

"I don't know much… but I know that you fell down from somewhere high. Very high. You could have died. The boy who saw you… if he weren't a bender, you wouldn't be here right now. Asherat, if he weren't half as good as he was, you wouldn't be here right now. He brought you to me. And here you are, finally awake after more than a week playing sleeping beauty in my hut. You owe him your life." Kaya narated as she went on examining her.

"That's nice of him. I'll make sure to thank him properly." Korra hummed absentmindedly to the healer's chatter, her focus on the little cup of liquid feel-good in her hands. Of course it was a bender who saved her. Bending was the _awesomest_ thing in the world, so who else could it be but a fellow water bender?

… except he wasn't exactly a fellow water bender any more, was he? Just like that, her drink-induced good mood took a nose dive. He wasn't her fellow water bender… cause she was a water bender no more. She was a defunct Avatar… and an airbender now, one that couldn't even prevent her own plummet to near death in the Arctic Sea.

She went quiet and still, gripping her honey ginger juice cup in two hands. Kaya's chatter dimmed in her ears, and suddenly she was sitting by herself in a stranger's hut, alone in a strange land, adrift in a strange time. Lost, and confused in a place that wasn't hers.

She had lost her bending for… exactly two days now, that she can remember, yet it was still so hard to believe… so hard to get it through. Privately, she still felt as though if she just stamped her feet long enough, the earth would raise to her command, punched the air strong enough and fire would sprout from her knuckles. And water, her home element, her first element… water that used to dance with her since she was a little snot-nosed three years old and rained icy wrath on the village kids who thought taking the teddy wolf-bear from the village's budding waterbender three-years-old-and-zero-self-control little miss spitfire was a good idea.

The bone cup went cold and clammy in her hands. Something stirred in the floorboard and in the ceiling and it killed the morning sunlight with a kiss. Korra's monster rose from the floor soundlessly, looking her in the face with its deep dark eyes and a smile. She flipped a switch in her head and made everything go dark, then she retreated to a corner, trying to hold the cold at bay and praying that it wouldn't find her.

"Are you listening to what I'm saying?" Kaya said irately, her face an inch from Korra.

"Oh… uh…" She blinked, and the room was sunny and wacky and crammed tight with Kaya's stuff again. That dark hidden place in her head had retreated.

"I said… that he's going to be here any minute now and you should get something decent on yourself." Kaya repeated, eyeing her fur-clad body.

"Uhh…" Who?

"The boy. The one who saved you."

"Right. Sorry. I guess I wasn't as up as I thought I was. My brain still feels like melting butter." She looked down, found that all she had on her was a beaten-up shift dress with long billowy sleeves. She drew her legs out from underneath the furs and saw that the dress was fraying at its end. A draft blowing pass her bare calves and between her legs drew notice to the fact that she had absolutely nothing else on… not even her favorite Sporty Girl-Bender, Water-Tribe edition Sarashi.

"Where are my clothes?" She looked around, hoping to see them lying somewhere in the mini mine yard that was Kaya's hut.

"They are ruined." Said Kaya, matter-of-factly. "When we brought you in, you were little more than meat and broken bones. We had to get your clothes off to start working on you, and the only way to do that without breaking anything further was to cut them to pieces and pull them off one by one." She stood up, went to a closet sandwiched between a chemical case and a five-feet tall vase with huge rust-colored feathers sticking out its opening, opened it up, rummaged for maybe a minute or so before turning back with a set of Sarashi and a simple sheath dress with an open collar, unsurprisingly in white, blue, and purple. "I still keep the pieces, but they aren't much good right now." She said as she handed them to Korra. "You can wear this for now."

With some hesitation, Korra took them from Kaya, who went off to look for something that could work as a coat over that flimsy ensemble. The sheath dress was almost as beaten-up as the one she had on. It was only narrowly saved by its vivid but predictable dye job. And the Sarashi… eewww… second-hands… Korra scrunched up her nose as she fingered the material, wool, and old, but at least it wasn't fraying as the shift dress and there was no stain visible. Seeing as there was no other alternatives except for going starker under the dress, which might be a-okay in Republic City but a big no-duh in the winter lands that were the Water Tribes, she pulled the lower part on over her legs gingerly, slipped out of the shift dress, shivering somewhat at the cold morning air, then put on the upper part. They fit snuggly around her, comfortable as several-years-worn things tended to be.

Kaya was buzzing around the room, hopping over pots and pushing cases aside to find more layers and laying them on her lap. She left the old woman to her busy bee routine.

_What was that all about?_ She thought as she opened the sheath dress. The episode just before Kaya yanked her back to reality. She hadn't felt like that for… a long time. Small, and weak, and insignificant, a husk emptied off strength and soul.

Someone was pounding on the door, and dimly she registered Kaya yelling for whoever was at her front door to hold their sea-horses and give a lady her time. Her thoughts had her full attention.

She couldn't bend. The idea sat like a lump of ice in her belly and for one moment she thought the room was going to go dark again. She held it at bay this time. If there was anything Korra hated more than appearing weak, it was being weak itself. Growing up as the only daughter of a wolf-warrior father and a waterbender mother, both of whom had made their lives with their own two hands from bare ground up, and discovered as the Avatar since four years old, for much of her life, she had rarely ever allowed herself to be weak. Avatars weren't weak. Aang wasn't weak, despite what a lot of war-mongering lords and kings had whispered behind his back. And she, Korra you-gotta-deal-with-it Avatar, sure as hell wasn't weak.

She was in the past. That was the thing that mattered now, not the fact that she still hadn't regained her bending. She was in the past, and she wasn't going to think of nothing else. Korra told herself as she pulled the dress over her head, let it settle around her knees. She turned and gave Kaya the go to open the door.

She was in the past. Aang and Kyoshi had sent her to the past, for whatever reason. She looked down, smoothed out a wrinkle in her dress. Which meant that there must be a way for her to regain her bending. There must be, because the thought of otherwise frightened her, scared her to death. If there weren't, they wouldn't have bothered in the first place. If there weren't, she was sure she wouldn't even see them on that cliff twenty-six years in the future. Yes, there was a way. And that was the thought she was going to focus on now, the only thought she was focusing on.

She took a deep long breath, told herself – Here I come, wacky freaky era of the past – and looked up.

Light flooded the hut from the opened door. Kaya stood to a side to make way and in came a boy spotting a two-tail hairdo and a cow-lick on his forehead.

"Don't run in my house, Tarrlok!" Kaya snapped at him.

This time, very much different to barely half an hour ago, Korra's mind was up and running, and the name itself hammered in her heart. She had a split second to form one word in her head – 'That…' – before the doorway darkened one more time, sunlight from outside blocked by the tall frame of the second visitor.

"Come in, Noatak." Kaya said to the second comer, beckoning him inside.

Korra sat ramrod straight in her bed, staring forward, the weight of the second name ricocheting in her heart like stray bullets. The boy – Noatak - stood in the door way, looking her in the eye. Her ears bubbled as she listened to the one word that came rolling out from his mouth.

"Hi." He said, slightly breathy from the cold and wind outside, rubbing his red nose, and smiled.

* * *

**End Chapter 3 **

* * *

1/ If you have questions regarding the updating pace and schedule of this fic, please take a look at my profile. If that still doesn't answer your questions, please read the note below this.

2/ I realize that my updating pace has a lot to desire. The last time I updated Book Air was almost a month ago, and for an average of five to six k words per chapter, that isn't fast at all. If anything, it's sedate, especially compared to other Amora fics. That's something I'd like to fix… if I were actually able to… but please understand that unlike a lot of LoK fan authors, I am a working adult. Moreover, I work as a journalist. What I write is usually paid by the article and chockfull of stress and credibility. I came to the fanfiction world as a way to unwind and to let my imagination run free. Please understand that despite what we all want, the fact is that Book Air and other fanfics of mine are unlikely to get top priority in my writing schedule and their pace will probably not pick up by much… unless I'm on a roll or something… or my boss editor releases me from my slave-labor contract… which isn't likely to happen in the next decade or so… so there. If this still doesn't answer your questions, then you are welcomed to leave them in a review. I'd be happy to keep you up-to-date on the word and progress-count of new unpublished chapters.

3/ Sorry for possible typos and grammar mistake. English isn't my native language. It's not even my second language, more like third or fourth or something.

4/ Gee… there's this Noarra scene I want to write: an Eskimo kiss. I have it in my head. This messy accidental but not quite accidental Eskimo kiss… incident… where Korra, not wanting to look like a cultural ignorant, proceeded to show Kaya, Tarrlok, and Noatak that she so knew how to say hello Northern Water Tribe style on Noatak (completed with little mental remarks on how teenage-Amon smells funny in Korra's head and the cultural aftershock following that hello kiss on all parties present). In the first draft of Book Air, that Eskimo kiss scene was going to be in the chapter four, right after this chapter. But on second revision, it doesn't really follow the logic of the story and the information we have so far on Korra's extended family. There's such a little chance of Korra not actually knowing something as basic as the greeting protocol of her sister village in canon, that trying to explain it in this story seems forced and awkward. So I had to scrap that scene. I still want to write it so badly though. Maybe I'll just write it as an omake and leave it as a your-millage-may-vary thing. You can either take it as a part of the story or not. I think that would be a good alternative.

5/ Plot bunny ensues. I have the plots of… three more Amorra fics in my head. One is a wacky, semi-serious romantic comedy (bare bone premise here le-feline . tumblr post / 29010998025 / foxgoddess-le-feline-meet-me-at-aang ), one is an AU story where a short conversation with Katara right before leaving South Pole changed the way Korra approached her problems in Republic City and consequently everything else, leading to her understanding a lot more about the man she had, at first, feared so much. The last one is an AU of season one ending, in which Aang doesn't appear, Korra commits suicide for real but fails as she accidentally activates the Avatar State in self-defense and finds herself stuck in an island in the middle of nowhere upon waking up. Several days later, an icicle bearing a frozen Amon washes onshore said island. I am contemplating if I can actually fit one more fic in my schedule… but which one among the three? I'm kinda leaning toward the first romantic comedy one, but I want to hear other opinions too. What do you think about it? Which one do you want to read most? Please tell me if you can.

6/ Lastly, my Amorra gallery le-feline . deviantart gallery / 37865252


	4. Chapter 4

Disclaimer: I do not own Legend of Korra and its characters.

_**Book Air**_

Premise: To regain her bending, Korra must make a choice, go back to the past and either kill a teenage Noatak, or save him. But things are never as simple as they appear to be.

**Chapter 4**: A Disastrous Meeting

* * *

The day Noatak met the girl for the first time, face to face, his people called day of the Waning Sun. A day marked on the Calendar of many a hunter, just a few weeks before the Sun set for months and the Dark half-year stepped in fully on center North Pole. No wind. Cloudless skies on the brink of either perpetual dawn or perpetual twilight. And the brilliantly-lit air like glaciers made of sunlight against the back of his exposed neck and the reddening tip of his nose. Perfect day for a hunting trip, he wouldn't have to worry about flash storms or ice wolves smelling him from downwind before he put the spring on them. Also a perfect day to catch a cold if he weren't careful and make sure to wear his furs outside, as his mother always said.

He stood before Kaya's door with his brother, waiting. Drips of morning snow dropped down his head and shoulders from the leather awning above. Kaya opened the door. His brother, as impatient as ever, barreled in before he could say a word. He followed close behind, slow and wary. One simply did not run in Kaya's hut.

He was half-way pass the door-frame when he saw her. The girl. She sat on the bed Kaya had made for her from the furs and leathers of his father's shed, staring at him, face pale and bloodless. He stopped. The gravitas of her stare pulled his gaze to her. Sunlight followed him through the door, into the room, slithering up the girl's chest and face and smearing bright strokes on the canvas of her skin. Noatak's shadow ran the length of the room, coming to a stop at the foot of her bed, fluttering shyly as it licked her bare feet, right under the hem of her skirt.

Noatak's memory of her was hazy. The first time he fished her out from the sea, he was preoccupied with keeping her alive until he could reach Kaya. The second, third, fourth, and further times, there was a screen between them, always. Kaya and her tiger-seal screen, and the fact that the girl had little on her but furs and more furs and perhaps some of Kaya's old things, and him trying his best to heal a patient who he was not allowed to see, per his own Tribe's laws. It was for these reasons that ten days after he saved her, Noatak saw her for real for the first time.

She was pale. Paler than she should be, sick or not. And thin. Her bed rest had siphoned the strength from her body, he saw. Her face full of edges. Her hair unbound and running free in ink dark rivulets down her exposed collarbones. Her eyes glinted something sharp and pointing towards him.

"Hi." He tried, smiling and brushing the snow from his hair and shoulders. Concern and curiosity beat their wings wildly in the back of his head.

The girl said nothing, did nothing, giving no reaction, except for a widening of her eyes. Dimly, he registered Kaya scolding his running and hopping brother and Tarrlok dishing out a flirty greeting to the girl.

_Alright_, he told himself, shrugging nonchalantly in his head. _She's not all there yet. Girl is a bit swirly in the head. Understandable_. And he let his gaze wandered away from her to Kaya, expecting to discuss the - as of yet still unnamed - girl's further healing with the village's Angakuit in privacy afterwards.

_Delicate as a flower she said_. He thought to himself, performing a perfect imitation of Kaya's voice in his head, plus a few extra embellishments. It could just be that she was still out of sorts from her near-coma, but as of yet, the strange girl didn't appear to be the sharpest tool in the shed... and bothering on being stand-offish, with the way she was staring at him owlishly. Well, as Kaya requested, he'd be gentle around her, and talk to Kaya somewhere where she couldn't see nor hear them.

He took one more step, pass the threshold, stopping momentarily to push off his boots with his feet. He didn't want an earful from Kaya on how she didn't like mud and melting snow on her floor. Asherat knew the place was a mess enough without that. Then he took one more step, weaving between Kaya's bric-a-bracs. That was when the girl opened her mouth and spoke for the first time.

"Stay. Away." She said... no... hissed...no... He wasn't sure. He wasn't sure if he heard it. He wasn't even sure if she said it. The words came gusting by his ears as if they were smoke carried by a stray wind. Thin, and reedy, and ghostly, and full of spikes. The kind of errant invisible wind on a still day that that made hairs stand up on the back of his neck. His head whipped up from the small puddle on the floor he was looking at. She was looking him dead in the eye.

He opened his mouth, closed it. He was about to ask: 'What'd you say?', but something stopped him cold. The very same thing that stopped him from turning to Kaya and check if she'd heard it too. Something in the nameless girl's face. A hole, an abyss, had opened up behind her classic Water-tribe blue eyes, dark and haunting, like a gateway to some other world that he didn't dare venture. The abyss looked Noatak in the eyes, swallowed him whole.

Now, the few events that happened afterwards took place within seconds amidst the chaos and confusion, but for one little Water Tribe boy, the son of Kyneoa and Innana, they could have taken place over a century for all he knew.

In the first second, Noatak stood up straight with his head near reaching the hut felt-lined ceiling. His fists clenched. Feet apart firm on Kaya's wood floor in a classic hunting stance. He was suddenly tense, and he wasn't sure why. He was a hunter of fourteen turns of the sun who had stood without quaking before a bull whale. He now stood before this gaunt nameless girl, barely able to keep the ripples of nervousness from escaping his heart and slipping into his body, as if this was not some sick girl he'd healed over the last two weeks, but a strange and dangerous animal about to maul him to death if he made the wrong move.

_Ridiculous_. Noatak's mind said. Just scant seconds ago, he'd thought her a bit woozy in the head. _No_. Said his hunter's instinct. _She is not to be underestimated. This one has teeth._

In the second second, it came clear to him. He smelled her where he stood. The girl, who probably had woken up not more than a few hours ago, wore her two weeks playing infirm on her body like a fur cloak, an invisible fur cloak made of a conglomerate of odors, none of them good. She smelled of greasy hair and unwashed body, of wet armpits and bitter antibiotic ointment and old bandages that needed changing. The sour cheesy smell of sickness hang above her head like a shroud. The smell of dried menstrual blood came from between her legs, cloying beneath the fabric of her skirt, flying low under the cool scent of the cotton dress Kaya must have lent her. The junction of her neck, right at the spot where the soft creamy line of her throat met the centre of her shoulder-blades, just above the plane where her chest swelled to connect with her breasts, smelled of female sweat, smelled sweet and moist and warm and pungent.

In that one second, he stood there, taking her in breath by breath. She slipped into him with each inhale he made, filling his nose, filling his lungs, filling him all the way from his chest to his frost-bitten fingers and chaffed toes, filling him to the brim. All of these smells he'd known before, had familiarize himself to them in the two weeks during which he visited her every day.

But underneath all that, there was something else. Something lurked beneath her skin. Something wasn't there yesterday, or the day before that, and every other days for the last two weeks. It was as if some creature had woken up at the same time that girl opened her eyes and rest her gaze on him.

In the third second, Noatak was still as a statue. He looked at the girl, her face drawn in sharp contrast. Firelight coming from Kaya's burning hearth shone a warm golden glow on half of her face. The other half was caught in the dark, in the shade of the hanging rows of cases and shelves that made up half of Kaya's hut. Her eyes stood in this divide of dark and light, looking at him, pinning him where he was; her lips pressed to a thin line; the line of her jaws rigid.

Noatak said not a word. He made not a move. He was suddenly overwhelmed. He felt like a hunter who had gone on a dark half-year hunt unprepared, and now his prey had caught him without his spear and alone out in the tundra, and now she was no prey at all, now she was all teeth and claws and an open, gaping mouth.

In the fourth second, Noatak did something he rarely did within the confines of his home village, Emeq. He flared his bloodbending. He meant to get a read on this girl that had unnerved him so, and maybe soothed her a bit, like he did the stray wild beasts that came too near the village once in a while; perhaps even restrained her... if - and not a large if either with the way she was looking at him - the need arose.

In the fifth second, everything went to hell.

* * *

Korra's blood curdled in her veins as _he_ walked in. Not the water tribe boy wearing the ridiculously pansy-looking hairdo. No. _Him_. Amon.

She wasn't calling him Noatak. Tarrlok can go shove it for all she cared. She wasn't calling him Noatak. Period.

Amon was... a made-up name for a thing that lurked in the dark. False cover for fake contents. A mixture of sounds, vowels and syllables, put together under one single goal: to awe and intimidate. Fitting, for the fraud this boy would become.

Noatak, on the other hand, sounded too... close to home, Water-Tribe-ish, too genuine, like a name a mother could really give her son. If she were back home in the Southern capital right now, Korra expected to walk out in the streets at random andl be able to find someone, or the distant relatives of someone, bearing that name.

Great river, it meant. A good name. An old name. One that resurrected memories of crackling fireside on the snow under a starry dark sky with the whole village of probably not more than a dozen families or so in attendance, of smiles, and dance, and warm colors and music aplenty; memories of long hunting trip through the barren winter land, slogging through the muddy ground and the periodic storm. Noatak was like the call of the river of Korra's childhood home, all that glittering blue water just beckoning for her to dip her little feet in them.

Noatak... Noatak was too good for a creature like Amon. She refused to call him Noatak, in her head, and outside. Fuck Tarrlok and what he had to say.

But even as she tried to beat the name out of her skull, _he_ was coming in, pass the threshold now, and all of a sudden, Korra was on the verge of having a panic attack. The space between him and her bed couldn't have been more than six feet, closing in. He looked at her face, eyes going up and down, then away, dismissive. The easy movements of this single gesture saying loud and clear that he didn't think she was much to look at... or think about.

"Stay. Away." She forced two shaking words out of her mouth, but what she really meant to say was 'Don't you dare dismiss me. Don't you dare look away from me.' Funny how fear and shame never failed to screw her act up.

Either way, her whispery croak caught his attention. The boy, the child Amon - and calling him that alone was enough to make her cringe inwardly. Amon was no more a child than Korra was the empress of Fire. Calling him that seemed an insult to the word itself - turned his attention back to her. There was hesitation in his face, a rare moment of doubt in a long string of self-assured confidence she was sure, and that made Korra happy in some twisted way... until she realized she was looking at him too closely... and too long. She was starting to see the similarities.

Here and there, dotted on a face caught between a child and a man, were little details that reflected back to the thing he would become... or the man who'd come before him. The planes of his face were still soft and plump with childhood but the framework had been laid, and was slowly taking up shape. The eyes, like his father Yakone, like Amon. The forehead. The sharp turn of his cheekbones. The lines of his jaw, square and strong and so classically Northern Water Tribe.

All of a sudden Korra was back on the day where she saw his face for the time. She stood up on the balcony. He was down below looking up. The crowd roared. She roared too, so eager to let the world know the fraud he was. 'Now ya gonna get it pal.' She thought. So naive. So stupid. He didn't hesitate for one second, merely took off his mask, right then and there, to an attendance of more than two thousands of his stout supporters. The first time Korra saw the man behind the mask, she had thought, in the first heart beat before she could stop herself, that he looked too nice to be the bad guy. Weren't they all supposed to be all 'evil-looking' or something? Bald like a peeled potato, or at least an albino. Everybody and their mothers knew albinos were evil. Have a boogie mustache. Pointed bat ears. Nasty teeth. Hunched-back. Red-rimmed eyes. That was what the bad guys were supposed to look like... or her adventure-cum-fantasy paper-backs lied to her. That was the thought that sprang from her head a split second after Amon took off his mask to an audience of what must be thousands of Republic City civilians.

Wind the clock back twenty-something years, now she was looking at that exact same face... or... the premonition of it, the larvae of a poison worm.

Trembling where she sat amidst a pile of old furs and torn-up blankets, Korra thought to herself. This pansy-looking kiddo in front of her was Amon in the making. No question about. And Korra wanted him to get the fuck outta her face, and get the fuck outta her hut. No question about it.

She drew herself up, pulled on the reservoir of her strength, filled her mouth with bravado and was about to let loose the first salvo when she felt it.

Bloodbending.

Amon-the-kid was bloodbending _her_. And his metaphysical touch was like that of wet fingers fluttering all over her feverish body, fingers that peeled off her skin, carved off her bones, and dug deep inside her, through her veins, through her womb, through her guts, through her lungs, only to finally touch upon her heart, her quivering, beating human heart.

Korra opened her mouth, and what came out weren't just words alone.

"I said..." She could hear the vibration in the air, like invisible fire that burned in her throat. "...stay..." The fire was outside of her, rippling like wind, like tiny, microcosmic wind. "...away..." Was she shaking? Or was it the world the one going for the flip? Cause all she could see were things moving, shaking, all over the hut. Kaya was suddenly shaking too, shaking and staring at her with a dear-in-head-light look to her aging face "... from **ME**..."

The world went supernova.

The countless clay pots, pans, and jars were the first to explode in a cloud of flying debris, flinging water everywhere. The flasks and bottles went flying off the shelves. Kaya's wood table exploded in a shower of splinter dust. The cabinets smashed against the wall, then through it when part of the wall collapsed. The fire went up, roaring. Some of those flasks must have had oil inside, because they fed the hearth and turned it into a raging beast. Scrolls and scrolls of paper went aflame as the fire spread across the floor.

Somebody screamed. Could have been Kaya. Could have been Tarrlok. But it sure wasn't Amon-the-kid, 'cause he was still staring at her. She stared at him too. Korra never backed down from a fight. Their gazes locked onto each other. She watched the shadow of the burning fire danced on his pale and bloodless face, expecting to find fear in them. There was fear... but only in tiny amount, slim lines around the tightening of his jaws. The rest of it, however, was fascination, a keen fascination that lighted up his blue eyes against the red backdrop of the burning hut.

_What manner of beasts are you?_ They seemed to say. _Never mind. I'll just just open you up and see for myself what makes you tick._

The next few minutes felt like years. She probably would have carried on staring at him until the fire burned them both alive if it weren't for the stinging pain that tore through the haze in her mind. She looked down on reflex, breaking off their gaze. She was bleeding. Deep gashes on her arms. Blood flowed out in fat streams down her hands to her lap. She turned up, saw him eyeing her bleeding arms, his bloodbending still on.

Something snapped. Several somethings snapped actually, like light switches going on-again and off-again inside her head, and unlike last time, this time, she couldn't stop them.

In a flutter of motions, Korra wound her arms tight into her cotton dress, stood up, bolted through the hole in the wall, and ran away from the burning hut.

* * *

She wasn't sure for how long she ran. When she first woke up, she'd thought it was morning. Now, she wasn't so sure. The sun was wrong. The air was wrong. The land was awashed in a pale palette of blue, purple, pink, and orange, like twilight caught in the haze of dawn. People flashed by her, crying and screaming and heading for Kaya's hut. She thought some of them might have called out to her, but she didn't have the mind for them right now.

She trudged through the snow, her feet numbing seconds by seconds, leaving bloody foot prints on the snowy white ground, heading to... where-ever.

_What are you doing?_ A voice in her head. _What are you doing, Korra?_

She almost missed a step. Here came the generation-long case of MPD every Avatar shared.

"Are you stupid? I'm getting away." She breathed through her mouth. The wind blew her own breath at her face in wet, hot puffs of air. She held herself tighter. The clothes she wore were in no way adequate for North Pole climate.

The voice paused for a moment. _Getting away... where?_

I don't know. Anywhere. She thought back, keeping her mouth shut this time, holding on to her dwindling strength. Anywhere that is not here. Anywhere that is not near him.

… _Weren't we sent here to deal with him the first place? _It chose not to mention the fact that she was heading into the bare tundra, where she would most likely die, alone, out in the snow, in a pool of her own blood.

"I'm not ready." She bit out, against her better judgement. She just woke up from who knew how long. Her body was weak. She felt weak. She could bend nothing but air and even air was screwing up her game, screwing it up big time.

Another long pause. She was going up hill, struggling with each step. She slipped once on her bare feet, hitting her head against the ground, got up, and kept walking.

_Kyoshi is right. You really are afraid of him. He scared you bad didn't he?_

"No, I'm not." She would have shouted if she still had the strength, but since she didn't, the words came crawling tiredly out of her cracking dry lips. She licked them, feeling her body quickly losing moisture, tasting the tang of blood on them. "I'm not afraid of him."

She felt cold. So strange. She hadn't felt cold for such a long long time, back in the day when she hadn't discovered her Avatar status. Afterwards, fire warmed her, earth kept her safe. The world was her friend, her toy. Now though, now she felt cold, and weak, and small, and insignificant. The bone-dry husk of the little spitfire she was before this whole Amon business. Dimly, she realized she was crying, tears falling hotly down her cheeks.

_Is it so hard to admit it to yourself? He's a child, Korra. He's a child still. He couldn't have been a day past fourteen, if even that._

"I'm not afraid of him." She muttered stubbornly as a new memory came to her. The second time she saw the face behind the Amon mask, he was falling, losing, and she was winning a blitzkrieg victory. The crowd cheered, for her, not for him, against him, not against her, as they should have done from the start. But even at the height of victory, she was only clinging onto Mako as she watched the man who had terrorized her for months crash and burn.

The hill sloped. She slipped again, hit the ground, and didn't get up this time.

_Korra?_ The voice sounded far away. _We're losing you._

She curled in on herself, holding the last of the warmth to her chest. Her blood was dropping fast, and so was her temperature. The world winked in and out. "I'm not... I'm not afraid." She said for the last time, then went under.

* * *

This time, when Korra woke, it was to a much different room. For once, the ceiling was high-raised and wood-made, and every thing was neatly organized. Second, someone was sitting beside her. Kaya.

"Easy girl, eaaasssyyyy..." The old healer crooned as she made a motion, one hand holding Korra's head in her lap, the other drawing waves above her belly. She was being healed.

Korra held still, leeching the warmth from the old Angakuit's body, waiting for her mind to return to her, waiting for her memory to unfurl itself. After a while, she mumbled against Kaya's hand.

"What happened?"

There was a pause. "Well, shouldn't that have been my question to ask?"

Korra had no answer to that. The Angakuit was right, of course. She was the one who brought down Kaya's hut in a fit of blind panic and wonky bending... was it really bending? Even in her usual I'm-the-Avatar-and-you-gotta-deal-with-it way, this was a fact even Korra couldn't deny. She felt the first wave of guilt rising.

"...You were out cold in the tundra, bleeding." Kaya picked up after a long period of silence. "You would have died if some villager hadn't found you out there and dragged you back in."

_Some villager_. No name. She picked on it right away. The Angakuit didn't want to mention who it was that saved her life. Why? She hadn't been here that long. She didn't know any body for Kaya to hide... except for one. Her thoughts stopped there, gathering for the final push.

_Good girl, Korra_. She thought, injecting herself with extra doses of irony. _You're getting smarter. You're gonna need all that smarts to live out here now that you can't bend worth twit._

"Was it him?" She said, finally, after a long period of quiet.

"Him who?"

She fixed Kaya a look. The Angakuit merely raised an eyebrow before calling out to someone behind a screen door. "Noatak."

Of course... Korra let out a breath she didn't know she was holding. Did she really think it could be anyone else but _him_?

Now that she was looking at it, twisting her head in an awkward angle for the view, she can see the boy-shaped shadow behind. The shadow stirred once, as if unsure.

"Come on." Kaya coaxed. "She's not going to bite." Then looked back at Korra with one eye. "At least, I hope you don't. Do you?"

The shadow moved to the edge of the screen door, opened it with a rattle, then in came the mini-Amon.

Mini-Amon. Korra turned the name around in her head, inspecting. She liked the sound of that. Like he was some small, harmless thing. She was going to use it for him from now on. The now newly-dubbed mini-Amon moved to the centre of the room. "We didn't introduce ourselves properly last time." He said from where he stood, eyeing Korra. His face guarded, not moving an inch closer. She felt nothing from him. No dark stirring of wet fingers on her skin. He wasn't bending nothing but his own tongue. "I'm Noatak... of Emeq."

I'mnotafraidI'mnotafraidI'mnotfraid. Korra repeated the mantra in her head, propping it up like a mental walking stick. "Korra." She replied after a moment or so, inflating her words with her bona fide brand of Korralicious spunk. "I don't bite."

* * *

**End Chapter 4**

* * *

Angakuit = the spiritual leader of Inuit culture, also functions as a healer, a mentor, a teacher. Obviously, as most other things from the Avatar-verse, this is simply a borrowed concept with choice embellishments. It (and Kaya) is not meant to be an exact representation of the real-world Angakuit.

* * *

1. Is this a good time to let you know that I don't write romance-y stories like % 99 of writers out there? A word of warning. If you're looking for a fluff fic or a masturbatory/wank fic, then this is not the story for you. Anyone who already read my Naturo work, Tis Femina, should have some idea of what kind of a writer I am, but for the uninitiated, please don't expect the usual pointless and badly written porn or sap pieces from me. You will be sorely disappointed if you do. On the other hand, people looking for a story with a good plot line, compelling characters (even villains of the day), an adult take on how the world rolls, and oodles amount of world building and not afraid of venturing to places unknown in the labyrinth of human minds, then welcome aboard. You came to the right place. After this chapter, the story will enter its main body where... stuffs happen.

2. The draft name for this chapter is 'The unforgettable first date of Noatak and Korra'. No bullshit.

3. It really is jarring how different fandoms are. I write this story on the same timeline and schedule with Mirror Mirror (HP/Avengers crossover fic), and at chapter 4, Mirror Mirror already has 1500+ follows and clocked in at 80+ reviews per chapter. Still, I actually like the writing in Book Air better. The world is more fluid, the characters more vulnerable and pliable to changes.

4. Please excuse the possible typos and grammatical mistakes (in lieu of colloquial uses of language). Again, non-native user of English language here.


	5. Chapter 5

Disclaimer: I do not own Legend of Korra and its characters... except for that one Canticle of Threnodies down below.

_**Book Air**_

Premise: To regain her bending, Korra must make a choice, go back to the past and either kill a teenage Noatak, or save him. But things are never as simple as they appear to be.

**Chapter 5:**** Before the Dark**

"_In the shadows, he calls for blood, and the blood answers him. In Half-Dark where the Moon lies dead, Asherat sings a song of Sea and Blood."_

- Emeq Cult Canticle of Threnodies 103 on Half-Dark, Sea Goddess, and Waterbending-

* * *

Korra sat there on a quilt, in the middle of the room, about ten paces away from the burning hearth. For the life of her, she couldn't recall a time when she felt so... on display... minus for those times with Republic City Press, those vultures! But this felt different... somehow, more... at home. That made it all the more annoying. Around her, the people twittered.

"Hey, hey..."

"Is that her?" "Yeah"

"Is she dead? I heard she died." "Dumbass! She's sitting right there!"

"What's her name?" "Huh, no idea. Go ask her yourself."

"She looks strange." "She needs to work on that hair. Oh, they look dreadful. She should have braided it or something. A proper lady takes care of her hair. At least have it in loops. Isn't she Water Tribe? You'd think she was one of those barbaric Fire Nation gals! Rar, I'm on fire. My hair's on fire and all that" "I like her eyes. They look pretty."

Somebody poked her on the side, going 'ooohh' as they did so, as if they'd just discovered some strange beast from the wild. Somebody else fiddled with her hair, which was matted to her head in one filthy fibre-y mass... which stunk... to high heaven. Apparently, the person agreed with Korra's inner assessment on her hair because she, or he, or whoever that was, pulled on it, hard. _Okay, that's it!_ Korra felt the first wave of irritation coming over her. She was sitting there in nothing but a baggy old dress and too much bandages to last her a lifetime, and these people better give her some space to mull things over, damn it!

"Dude, cut it out!" She said finally, irritation coming over her patience. That was five minutes of social torture, down to the seconds. Tenzin better be proud of her progress. He was the one who was all '_you've got to be patient Korra! A leaf on the wind_' the whole frigging time.

To her satisfaction, the crowd, all young girls and stay-at-home moms with a few too-young-for-field-works boy children scattered here and there, stilled and quieted for a moment... before erupting anew.

"She speaks!"

"Oohh.."

"I thought she couldn't speak! Hey, Nyall! You said she couldn't speak!"

_What the hell?!_

"I thought she was a mute."

"That was one strange accent, reckon she's from the South. I aint ever hear any from the Capital speaks like that."

"And what would **you** know of Capital people accent? You haven't been outside of this village for... oh I don't know... twenty years maybe!"

_Okay, this is not working_. "Hey, pals! You're giving me a headache" Korra tried again. "I said... cut it the fuck out." There was one word in that sentence Korra wasn't used to using. _Fuck_. Not because she was shy of it, but rather because of her living condition. Having stayed nearly all her life, including her formative years, in an isolated compound full of old people and bodyguards of an even older organization whose goal was to raise and protect the Avatar of the generation, Korra's repertoire of slangs and swear words was, understandably, limited. It wasn't until Republic City and the Bending Brothers that she started to add more to it.

In Bolin-speak, this was how to make the people of the slum straightened up and pay attention to you. Nobody in the dusty, rough-and-tumble part of the big R spoke like Tenzin or that ponce Tarrlok. This was the kind of speech that make them turn and pay you respect. Well, Korra wanted some of that respect now, so out came the big words.

Once again, silence descended on the crowd. But this was a different kind of silence.

_Uh oh..._

It took three seconds and a symphony of feminine gasps and indrawn breaths for the crowd to explode in a wave of condescension.

"There are children here!" One mother shrieked.

"You do not speak that way to me, young lady!" Another boomed.

"What a foul-mouthed child! Whatever will your parents say if they heard that!"

_My parents would be pretty frigging ecstatic to hear anything from me right now_. Thought Korra as she scooted back from the crowd of incensed mothers. Just what the hell was she thinking back then? Using slum-speak with these old-style Water Tribe mothers? Oh, her and her big mouth.

Luckily for her, Kaya came in a scant minute later and promptly saved her from the crowd.

"Hey, what are you doing to the poor girl? I said she needed her rest!"

An old man followed Kaya into the room, then a Water Tribe boy. Immediately, she was on the defensive. Mini-Amon creeped the eff out of her. In Korra's opinion, nobody with Amon in their name had any business going around looking like that, all... innocent and all around normal young teen boy. Heck, just how old was he again? Mini-Amon looked like he was younger than her. Hah, wouldn't that be the day!

"Show's over ladies." The old man said as soon as he was in. His voice carried something of an accent, with its coarse fibres and rough edges. "I don't care what your business with the girl is. You lot aint even supposed to be in here." Then he turned to Korra, locked eyes with her. One of his eyes was milked out, all white from the inner corner bud to the tail, no iris. A scar went jagged over the lid, through the eyeball, then down to his cheek. The other eye was a muddy blue. That one muddy blue eye fixed her on the spot.

"I'm Hassuq, the chief of this village, which is Emeq. And who are you?"

"Umm... I'm Korra." She answered, alternating between the chief and mini-Amon at his back. Just why the hell was he here anyway?

"No. I don't mean your name. Who are you? Where did you come from?"

"Uhh..." She stuttered, at a loss of what to say.

"Noatak found you in the sea two weeks ago." Hassuq gestured with his head. "He aint said a word of it since then. Aint a lot of ships around this sea. Did your ship wreck? S'that how ya are here?"

The look on the chief's face said he wasn't letting this one go without a proper answer. But something told Korra saying the truth would only earn her a stint in whatever these people had for a prison for mental people. A month ago she would have done just that, tell the truth, no matter how crazy it sounded. But then again, a month ago, she was the girl who tried to tell Amon's true identity to a crowd of hardcore Equalists and expected them to believe.

She foundered for a full minute, finally spitting out. "I don't know."

"What do you mean you don't know?"

"I don't remember..." She feigned. _When unsure, try the amnesiac card_. That was Sokka's one advice to her, before the man kicked the bucket himself. _Works all the times_. He'd said. Well, lets see if he was trying to prank her as he usually did. "There was... a storm. Then I woke up here... I mean, in Kaya's hut. I don't remember anything else. I... I don't know who I am.. or where I came from... I just... I don't know." She put what she hoped was a convincingly distraught expression on her face and some shakes to her shoulders. The poofy sleeves of her ill-fitting dress exaggerated the motions. The trembling timbre to her voice was all natural, not out from distraught, rather from the fact that she hurt all over. Ice burns and lacerations littered her arms and legs.

From behind the village chief, Mini-Amon raised an eyebrow. _Well, eff ya too, Punk!_ But Hassuq and Kaya exchanged a look laced with unexpected worry. The crowd twittered in choruses such as 'Oh, you poor girl', 'No wonder you're so lost.' and the likes. Apparently, Korra's 'scared-bunny' performance played straight to their maternal sensitivity. Whatever brief hostility they had for her before evaporated in an instance. Then Hassuq turned to the milling crowd.

"Alright. Get out, ya lot. Ya got works to do. Out ya go, through the door." He said, standing up and making a shooing motion. The crowd gave some protest but for the most part obeyed him without fuss. Then it was just her in the spacious room with a worried village chief and Angakuit... and Mini-Amon. Seriously, why was he here anyway? This didn't concern him. He'd got no reason to be here.

"Are ya sure you remember nothing?" Hassauq cut in before she could call Mini-Amon out. "Nothing at all? Can you remember your parent's names? Who they are?"

"Hassuq." Kaya admonished. "It doesn't work like that. If she truly doesn't remember, forcing her to would only do more harm than good."

"Easy for you to say. This just make things a lot more complicated. What are we to do with her?"

Instead of answering, the village Angakuit simply stood. There was a built-in cabinet by the wall. Kaya opened it and took out a bundle Korra recognized to be hers.

"Hey, that's mine!" Her clothes and parka. They were cut to shreds, and singed around the edges. About the only thing in tact was the decorative rock sewn into the parka collar. Her boots were nowhere to be seen.

"So you do remember them." Kaya eyed her shrewdly. Something told Korra she didn't exactly buy into her bluff, at least, not entirely. Oops.

"Uhmm... I guess." She parried, holding out her hands to receive the bundle.

"Anything else? When did you get it, perhaps? Did you buy it or make it yourself? Or if someone gave it to you?"

"I.. well... I don't know. I really can't remember anything else." Well, that was weak. "Sorry" Korra tacked on. There was a tense moment when Kaya simply eyed her. Then it passed, right before the moment she thought the Angakuit was going to call her out. Instead, Kaya gave Hassuq a look, who promptly took over.

"I aint gonna lie to ya, kid. The fact that you don't remember nothing from where ya came from... is pretty bad... for you. You know where we at, girlie?"

"The Northern Water Tribe?"

"Smart mouth. But that ain't gonna help you a lot here." Hassuq walked to the window, opened it. The light of dusk came in, flooded the room in one glorious show of purple, red, and pink.

Wait... dusk? Shouldn't it have been the middle of the day already? Korra burnt down Kaya's hut yesterday, slept an entire day and night away. It was the day after, and unless she'd been napping half the next day too, the view outside the window should be that familiar blue, white, and that mocha latte color snow got once too many people trampled over it.

"We are at a very special place in the Tribe's territory. We're at the Arctic Circle Line. What you're seeing... is the Haze. The Dusk and Dawn Haze."

Something in Korra sat up straight and started paying attention. The Line. The Arctic Line. There was not a Tribe child not taught about the Great Line. The Divide of Sun and Moon. Anything beyond was Half-Dark. The Tribe's name for the single circle at the very top where the Sun stuck out up there for half a year, while the other half was complete darkness. Half-Dark. Half a year of Darkness. For a people whose singular bending power depended on the rise and fall of the Moon, Half-Dark was dead land. No one but the most hardened of Wolf Warriors ever ventured past the line. Tales of its dangers and perilous land, of the treacherous ice turning on Tribe people wove the fine prints of the Water Tribe folklore. Half-Dark was the sole reason why the Northern Capital was built so low Southward in their territory, to ensure a normal Moon calendar. If it wasn't for its famous extremely hostile condition, Half-Dark could have been an impenetrable stronghold for the Fire Nation during the One Hundred Year War... at least, for half a year when the sun was up twenty-four seven.

But what that gotta do with Korra?

"It's been nothing but the Haze for about a month now." That was true. Now that she thought about it, the skies were like that when she ran away from Kaya's hut too, and even earlier, when she was taking a nose dive down from sixty thousand feet up there.

"Betcha don't know what that means." Hassuq flicked her nose, making a point. "Ya youngsters know these days are all about Republic City and how to grab a quick cash one-oh-one. Betcha know at least one of those, don't ya? Ya lot will sell anything, even your bending these days for the light of the big city."

"You're getting off course, chief."

"Oh, yeah, right. Anyway, what I'm saying is: Half-Dark follows the Haze. See, we only got bout a week or so until the Sun set for the year. Now, what does that have to do with you? Simple. This is not the only village round this part of the Pole. There are three others: Una, Nelann, and Awani. With Emeq, they form a trading block with a market in the center. A week from now, those three are going to start migrating Southward, towards the Capital. They are gonna follow the Sun out. But not we. See, people around here call us the Moon Chasers, cause that's what it looks like to them. One week from now, we go past this line... and deep into Half-Dark."

"What? Are you crazy?!"

"Ah, so you remember that at least?"

Uh... oh, shit. She'd better improve this amnesiac facade quick, or she was going to get called out pretty quick. Okay, no more slip, Korra. Focus, Korra! Act dumb. Yeah, act dumb.

To her luck, Hassuq didn't pay any more thoughts to that slip-up. Instead, he kept on going.

"We don't truly have a name, but if I needed to, I'd rather call ourselves the People of the Six Moons. You probably should take it from here, Kaya. This religious talk aint my turf."

That was exactly what the old priestess did, took the floor.

"You must have noticed by now. The people of Emeq follow the sea goddess Asherat."

"Yeah, that was pretty obvious... from the, oh I don't know, hundredth or so time somebody call her name right next to me." Korra drawled, earning a raised eyebrow from Kaya. She shut up real quick. Dumb! Okay, she can do it. Dumb! Not foot-in-mouth.

"Asherat is an old goddess. Majority of Tribes people follow Tui and La. Our legends say that our forefathers fled from a great War that divided the Tribes by following Asherat into Half-Dark eons ago, trusting in her to lead them through hard time. In the dark, she lit six moons for our sake, until we completed the circle and returned to peace."

"Okayyy..." Six moons. Six months. Some dudes back then were hard-core crazy enough to avoid a war by going into the dead zone, and actually succeeded. Korra could do symbolisms too.

"In thanks of Asherat, our forefathers built six temples where she lit the moons for us, and committed to tracing her footsteps every year forever after. You are now sitting in the seventh temple, Angerut Illautiwok, the Promised Peace, the only one not in Half-Dark."

"Now what this means to you is pretty simple." Hassuq cut in. "In one week time, everybody in this village is going to be gone. Everyone. And we won't leave a thing except for this empty temple. Not food, not shelter, not our fox-dogs, and not our buffalo-yaks. So in a week time, if you can't remember who you are or where you come from, ya gonna be the only living thing in around fifty-thousands miles or so, cause all the other villages are going to be gone too, down South. And in a week's time, all it's gonna be is dark around here."

He paused, looked Korra in the eye. The words started to sink in, like boulders into the deep ocean.

"Originally, I was going to send words into Capital, to whoever your relatives might be, and they were going to come for you quick. The other tribes can take a girl with them back to Capital, as long as there's somebody waiting for that girl on the other end. But there aint nobody there, cause you don't remember who they might be, Korra. So here we are, with only a week left for you to figure out who they might be. Can ya, or can ya not? If ya cannot, then it's gonna be Half-Dark for you too."

He stopped there, waiting. He waited for a long time while thoughts waged war in Korra's head. This was all a bit too much for her. She hadn't even finished processing the fact that she was twenty-something years back in time, with her bending gone. Now this old geezer was telling her to come clean on her bluff or they dragged her into the Water Tribe's infamous dead zone.

It was all superstition. She tried to tell herself. Half-Dark was a simply a place where the moon was lacking most of the time. It was all cultural biases. She was the Avatar. She didn't have only Waterbending to lean on. Well... ex-Avatar. But an old, infantile part in her upbringing were well-conditioned against that.

The land of the Dead Moon, some called it, where the Sun reigned half the year, and the other half complete darkness. No Sun. No Moon. And the stars were so weak they can barely see them in the all encompassing night. In the shadows, there was nothing but the moaning sea and the cracking ice beneath your feet. Death came quick and silent, for all those who treaded into Half-Dark walked on a land not made of earth but of ever drifting ice. A labyrinth of ice, ever shifting, morphing into new shapes. And beneath that ice, nothing but the deep, black sea, and whatever roamed its depth.

Eventually, Hassuq stopped waiting on her and turned to Kaya.

"Is this gonna take long? This..." He made a swirling motion with his fingers pointing at his head. "... 'don't know, don't remember' business?"

Kaya frowned. "Potentially." She said simply.

"How long are we talking here?"

"Years."

"Oh, that aint good. Asherat takes me to the sea and makes a right turtle-walrus outta me. That's real bad news for ya, girlie." He turned back to Korra. "We aint even deciding what to do with ya now. Homeless and..." He made a vague gesture at her. "... pennyless. Whatcha gonna do now? ya gotta earn the stuffs ya put in yer mouth since aint nobody pay it for ya."

Korra blinked, looked down at herself. The Chief was right of course. She didn't have nothing on her except for her clothes, which were in pieces now, mind, when she came to this time. But... but... this wasn't how it was supposed to go! The question itself flummoxed her. Aang didn't have to worry about that when he went flouncing around the Four Nations. The people just... gave him... stuffs. Wasn't it supposed to be that way on adventures? People should just... oh, she didn't know,... open their houses unconditionally for the heroes - which was her! Korra! - and give them stuffs without asking for payment. - Korra! Korra! Korra again. All this money talk, it was making her felt like that one time when she first came to Republic City and that one food stall lady demanded money for the barbecues.

Luckily for her, Kaya came in right there and give her a save. "She can stay with me." The Angakuit said. Yes! That was exactly how it was supposed to be! She just knew Kaya was a cool old lady!

In reply, Hassuq gave the old priestess a sharp look. "Ya sure?" He asked. "Last I checked, ya aint well off yaself, 'specially not after ya hut burned to the ground. Don't I just know ya was gonna be in trouble one day keeping all that fire fluid right next to the fire!"

"I still have the temples." Kaya parried. "My needs are modest. I have everything here. And the girl will hardly be idle."

Wut?

Kaya turned to her. Korra swore she saw something like mischief pulling at the old woman's eyes. "You didn't think it was all for free, did you? You are hardly blameless for my hut. And you still owe me for medical services rendered. Not to mention all that medicines and bandages, and the room rent."

Korra's mouth was somewhere on the floor as she looked back at Kaya.

"I am a healer, not a charity worker. I still have to eat. And... I can think of plenty of things for you to do. You will stay until you pay off everything you owe me. You better start soon. You have a big debt to chip off." She finished, with something like a smile playing at the corner of her mouth.

Korra was speechless.

* * *

Sometimes in the night, things started coming together for Korra. At the time, she was lying folded-in in a cot a pace away from the burning fire. The floor was cold, being made of stone and ice, it had none of the comfort of the wooden floor board in Kaya's burned hut. This place was a temple, meant for worshipping, not for housing people. It didn't have that lived-in warmth that only came with regular human residences. The cold also made for an excellent focus if one needed some thinking done in the night. Too cold to sleep, especially in this strange place, so she had nothing else to do but chase random thoughts, like rabbits down the hole, until all the rabbits were coming down the same hole.

Korra turned around in her cot, pulled her blanket tighter, and examined the thought bunnies.

She was back in time. Okay. Why was she back in time? Not what Avatar whatsherface and Avatar I'm-a-pansy-grandpapa-beard wanted out of it, but what **she**, Korra, the effing Avatar of this cycle, wanted out of it. Obviously, to regain her bending. There was no other goal. What could she want from this outflung, ice-pocked little backwater village? The empty space inside her was maddening. And... she was sure there was a way to do it. A way. Any way. Something had got to work. She just had to stamp her feet to the ground and find out what.

Then it came to how. How was she going to do that? She didn't know. Okay. She didn't know. But she had a clue. It had something to do with Amon the Kid. That one was a no-brainer. That was a good place to start. But where did it lead to?

Korra wasn't sure yet.

An image rewound in her head, like a badly mangled radio playback. The images her past reincarnations showed her, of an inescapable war between benders and non-benders, ravages, atrocities done in the name of unity and freedom. The normies, Bolin called them.

Korra was having a hard time wrapping her head around that. Amon was gone. He was gone. He ran! With tail tucked between his legs! She still couldn't see when it could have gone wrong... would have gone wrong. For the entire time, she had maintained the idea that Amon was one slick bastard, so slick he was able to manipulate an entire people to war over something as frivolous as no-bending power. She still maintained it now, to be honest.

The Equalist excuses just didn't ring with her. What the heck were their grievances all about anyway? That because they can't bend, they were treated poorly for it? What a load of crocks. Korra had normie friends too so it wasn't like she was a complete ignorant on the subject. Sokka, who was the frigging ex-chairman of Republic City, and Asami. Asami can rock the socks off just about anyone, and neither of them needed any bending to do just that. She'd heard about Tenzin's brother, Bumi too. Bumi the general of the United Naval Fleet. Last she heard, the man was one crazy old dude, and everybody better respect him or else.

The Equalists. Now, they just sounded like a bunch of whiners who couldn't put up with the fact that their sorry state didn't have nothing to do with their lack of bending powers. She had seen quite a few like them actually, but on the other side of the proverbial... and literal bend, benders who were probably better off not being one at all, the lazy ones, the talentless ones, the ones who could barely move a rock or float a puddle or spark a fire out of cracking dry leaves and tinder no matter how much they huffed and puffed.

Just like that time when she first came to Republic City, riding by that silly Equalist mouthpiece and his megaphone squealing about abuses of non-benders. Their arguments didn't ring then and it didn't ring now. No sale here. No sir. No sale. Not to this girl, ya! Aint buying ya bluff, no duh.

She turned in her cot, huffing out little puffs of free-floating irritation. Simply thinking about it was enough to annoy her.

But she wasn't in no position to argue the facts right now. The only thing she could assume was that along the way, she'd missed something. Something to do with Amon. Because it all came back to him. Maybe... maybe she didn't defeat him the right way. Like how Aang had to figure out how to debend the Phoenix Lord Ozai instead of just sticking a sword into him. She just... needed to find out what, and how.

It all came down to Amon, and now he was right here, with her. His kid self with minus twenty-something years of power and experience. He didn't know squats about who she was and what she wanted to do to him (throttle the spits out of that little snot-nosed brat for once! Maybe even punch his pretty boy nose in!). Yes, she can do this. Within the week before these Moon Chasers or whoever they were started their loony-in-the-head pilgrimage into the arctic deadland. She can do it. She felt it in her bones, like the time during Republic City attack, she just knew she had to take out Amon. If there was any thing to be said about her, it would be that Korra was the type who went wherever her instincts led her. It had served her in the past. She trusted it to serve her now.

She looked into the crackling fire and the lit, bony back of a sleeping Kaya, her pale white hair let down and swept to a side - by the table, a carafe full of herbal tea threw a column of shadow on the wall - and let these sweet thoughts lull her slowly, gently, under.

* * *

Despite what Kaya'd promised. Korra's first day after the three-way talk with the village chief and priestess was relatively pedestrian. Most of her time were spent by the fire, lying, and sometimes sitting, but no walking just yet, courtesy of the ice burns on the sole of her feet. Waddaya know! One can't run barefoot through the snow and out to the tundra after all, not if one no longer had Firebending and Earthbending to fall back on. She was charged with watching over the dozen or so concoctions - healing salve, burn paste, star-clam chowder for lunch and a side of onion cream soup, oven waste fuel, alcohol spirits, etc... - Kaya had bubbling above the fire.

The first hour was okay. She made a game out of guessing just exactly what Kaya had on in the pots. Most of her guesses were right. And the ones that she got wrong were simply ones that weren't invented yet. With several years of exclusive tutelage under Katara, the most renown Water Tribe healer of her time, she considered herself pretty good with herbal mixing and concoctions. A fact that still surprised many people to this day... including one Angakuit of a little backwater village in the middle of nowhere. The second hour was a little less fun. Then the third, and the fourth. And by the fifth hour, she thought she could feel ants scurrying about in her brain, their little spindly legs tickling the most inappropriate places in between her eardrums. Her body ached. She was an active girl, had to be when she used to be so full of pumping bending power all the time. Her days used to be filled with exercises and trainings and physical conditions. The last two weeks out cold didn't do her any good, and neither was her situation now, forced to a bed... cot... and left to rot. Kaya was gone most of the time, left to do some business of hers around town.

That night, Korra raised something of a stir. After some lengthy back-and-forth, the old priestess proceeded to change the bandages on her feet. She had a bowl of clear water melted from a high-mountain ice chunk with her when she did so. When she was finished, the bowl was dyed red all over and overflowing with gunk. The skin peeled off along with the cotton bandages in patches of translucent, cracked flesh-colored gauze. The nails were black and one by one, they dropped off, like dead caterpillars on the floor.

That was the first in a long time Korra cried out from pain. When the new bandages were on nice and clean around her feet, she was a quivering, sobbing heap in her cot. She stopped arguing afterward.

Kaya had made her point. Korra was in no condition to jump around like she was used to.

Ice burn. That was the first time ever that Korra felt the true extreme of her birth element and why people feared it. Ice. Snow. _Cold_. A cold so harsh it burned better than fire. It was as beautiful as it was perilous, a harsh, cutting beauty that did not love in gentle kisses.

The second day was... hazy. In the morning Kaya fed her pain relieve drugs and muscle relaxant. She spent much of the day in a sleepy, dazed state, alternating between watching the pots from overburning and a light, fitful dozing.

The third day was a little better. Most of the drugs had left her system, and while the pain was an incessantly nagging presence, she was getting used to it. Her mind cleared up a little, and with it, came a sense of urgency, a prelude to panic.

Three days. She had spent three days on a cot in stone, wood, and ice temple instead of out there figuring out how to get her power back. This was made worse by an event occurring in the middle of the day.

The boy came in without warning. Opened the door, floated the water-proofed seal skin bag in, followed it. The floating sandwich ball of water and stuffs hid his face at first, but by the time he was halfway across the room, she had gotten a good look in.

She stiffened in the cot, but Mini-Amon paid her no attention. Standing in the center of the room, he willed the floating water ball over her place, let it slip for a moment to slide the bag down. The things inside tumbled out in a mini-shower of clothes, trinkets, utensils, stuffs.

"Kaya said you can help out a little more." He said simply, not making eye contact, not even looking at her once, his voice even, not rising or lowering, like he was talking about the weather. Instead, he idly studied the boiling pots. "Sort that out. And you should watch out for that one. Looks like it's going to burn." Then he was out, just as quick and silent as when he came in, leaving Korra a seething, shaking mess in her cot, glaring at his retreating back.

There was the anger. Of course. There was also the knee-jerk fear that had become almost habit. But above all, there was confusion, a frustration that came from having no direction. It took Korra a full ten minutes to pick up the first item, an old wool sock, folded it up and put it to the side.

* * *

In the day after, the fourth day, bath time happened.

In the morning, Korra sat on the threshold of the door to the backyard of the temple, watching Kaya haul out a brass tub filled with sloshing hot water.

"Come on." She said once she got it where she wanted, wedged in a dirt yard halfway between the back door and a boulder that blocked out the entire rear-side of Angerut Illautiwok. "In you go. You are starting to ripen up a little."

Now, this was something not many outsiders knew about the Tribes people, but the average Water Tribe man or woman bathed (or showered, as the case may be) an average of once every month. A Fire Nation person would have screamed murder or its cultural equivalent, but once a month was a perfectly fine pace for most Tribes people. This was born out of necessity. With the exception of the Swarm people, in both Tribes territories, the North and South, a regular bathing schedule was an easy precursor to death by pneumonia.

Korra, on the other hand, was something of a special case. Raised in an environment that knew no lack of other cultures, courtesy of her elemental trainers and caretakers, and powered by an innately powerful Firebending since childhood, she had far less qualms on getting into the water.

So as soon as Kaya gave the go, she dived in with her bandages still on, a lot more eager to get wet than the normal Tribes girl. The water was at a comfortable degree, a few notches above lukewarm, but not hot enough to make it painful for her new skin. She felt herself going out from every pore, leaking like an ice cream cone going out a foam container, melting into the lapping water.

Ahhh...

That was her first bath since waking up in Emeq. That was her first bath since coming to this time, period. The stuffs that came off of her was giving the water a new coat of color at record speed.

Kaya worked around the tub. The old priestess wielded a scissor to her bandages, searing them in small, crisp cuts. Kora watched her work with fascination.

'You are really something, aren't you?' She wanted to say to the Angakuit, but held herself in check. Lately, she had been having to do that a lot. Holding back. Thinking before speaking. Checking before doing. She was slowly starting to realise that without her bending and her status to back her up, the consequences of her actions... can be a bit more than she can fend off. Still, Kaya was something. Kora had never heard of Waterbender healers who preferred to do things manually before. Katara would have had her up and running like she was brand new in a few days with her healing bending. Kaya on the other hand, employed salves, bandages, medicines, and bed rest. She had heard sometimes ago that it was the better way, let the body have a little more time to stretch itself out, instead of the abrupt yo-yoing healing bending can cause. But in this day and age, who actually followed that any more.

Korra leaned back in her tub, sinking until she was visible only from the eyes up, holding her breath like a pocket of pebbles in her mouth. Secretly, to herself, she didn't think Kaya was a good waterbender, at most, the priestess was a very weak one, or she was not a bender at all, and was only faking it. Korra had never seen her bend before.

She wasn't sure what to think about that.

When she finally got out, her skin was pruned all over and the water in the tub had turned into a mucky brown sauce. She wrapped herself delicately in layers of cotton towels as Kaya upended the tub - without bending the water out - and let the the 'sauce' sluiced to the ground.

Then came a 'small problem'.

They had gone back into the temple, in the room with the ever burning fireplace. Kaya took one look at her, clucked.

"We are going to need to find you some new clothes. These don't fit right." She announced.

Okay, new clothes. That was good news. Korra nodded absently, holding out her hands to receive yet another baggy old dress, this one made of mountain sheep-goat wool. Their supplies were running out so the need for clothes wasn't a surprise. Kaya's personal stockpile was burned down in the fire. All the things they had now was the temple's properties: donates, leftovers, and castaways by other people who no longer needed the things but thought the community would benefit from them. Such was the way of the Tribes. Community and sharing. Few things were truly considered a private belongings to the Tribes, rather, a person had use of an item before he or she no longer needed it and relinquished it to somebody else. It was a part of their cultural identity.

The only problem was, not a lot of those wearable castaways were her size.

"Maybe some smalls too." Kaya added, taking out a small purse, opened it, checked the content.

Underwear? Even better! Korra was getting sick and tired of wearing somebody's old undies. Uugghh... She might be hardcore Water Tribe babe, but underwears were where she drew the line. Traditional values had no business picking over her unmentionables.

"Shopping. Shopping. Shopping!" Kaya muttered to herself, fumbling over her purse. "Is the market still open? Oh, what was the last time they open again? I can't quite remember." She looked down her feet, back up. Korra'd finished dressing herself and was waiting expectantly. Then Kaya said something... surprising really wasn't the right word for it.

"But I still have to... oh... that Heiwa needs me over. I can't go now." More mutterings and fumblings, a few glances here and there, as if she was checking and crossing out her options in invisible square boxes. "But we need it! No sense in waiting. Only a few days left. Oh I better get that boy to go the market and pick 'em up."

Now, Korra might have stayed with the old woman for a few days so far - technically a little over two weeks, but most of that two weeks was spent in lalaland somewhere in her head -, but even she started to notice things about the other woman once it dawned on her that there wasn't a lot here to take her attention.

Kaya was a lonely old woman. That simple.

She had no family, no relatives. She was the priestess of a small weird-ass community where she practically babysat everybody's kids and everybody else not out there working. She taught math, writing and spelling to young children in the morning in a room some way around here. Korra had heard that unmistakable drollish chant of 'one plus one equals' and 'a, b, c' that only a classrooms had. She taught something like history and government function to the older kids around noon, or at least that was what the scrolls she took out with her around that time said she did. In the evening, she brew herbs, medicines, sometimes even dinner. In between that, she took care of their scratches, their skinned knees, their work injuries. She brought soups to the elderlies and made the village chief give up on his alcohols... or at least, tried to.

But all in all, Kaya didn't get a lot of visitors. Some came by, here and there. The rare visit once in awhile. As far as Korra knew, there was only one that stuck around that much, probably the only one Kaya was trusting with the fine details of her day-to-day operation here and there.

That boy.

She stood there for a moment, watching dazedly as Kaya, apparently already deciding what to do, settle down and started calculating the cost of two sets of clothes, a coat, a good pair of boots, and some female unders. Her head spun something good, trying to decide whether to let her thoughts head that way.

The combination was... unholy. She was almost tempted to check if she had accidentally sniffed one of Kaya's more suspicious brews up her nose without noticing.

"Kaya" Korra's voice came out thin and timid, unexpectedly so. The Angakuit was pushing away with her hand calculator while Korra stood there with the wind threading through her wet hair and the goosebumps started carpeting her skin. "Kaya." She tried again, stronger this time, and succeeded in snapping Kaya out of her frenzy.

"Yes, my dear." The priestess had the gall to ask. Korra looked at her, eyes wide with horror and absolutely speechless. She knew exactly what to say, problem was, she just didn't want to say it. Saying it was acknowledging it, in a way. And not in a million years would she do something like that?

It was almost surreal, to think that she had gone from engaging in city-destroying battles with Amon, the renegade Equalist leader, to trying to prevent Amon the Kid from handling her...

… _**NO!**_...

With sheer force of will, Korra forced the trajectory of her thoughts to a stop. They stood there on the proverbial mental cliff, looking down into a chasm of... horrifying possibilities.

Eventually, some of what was going on in her head must have shown, because Kaya's eyes went wide too, and her mouth formed an oh.

"Oh... ohhh..." It was so clear that Kaya was trying not to laugh. "Oh my. I'm sorry, my dear. Silly me. It's been awhile since I have to..." She failed, let a snicker escaped. "... account for these sensitivities. But not to worry. I know a lady in the marketplace. I'll simply write her a note. He wouldn't even know what he was supposed to get?"

Korre's hysteria paused for consideration - maybe? - then restarted full force. No! Just no! There must be no compromising!

"I can go" Korra insisted, trying to fight and desperately failing to stop the stop the heat blossoming on her cheeks. "I can go by myself. It's for me anyway right? Isn't it better that I go?"

"But you don't know the way, dear."

She was right, of course. This wasn't the usual local market around the block like in Republic City. Markets in these kinds of far-flung outposts were specific locations where the people of several villages came together to trade for goods and services. The nearest one to Emeq was quite a way away last she heard, in a place in between all four villages.

"Someone can take me there. I simply need to know the way. I can walk now, see!" She paced a few steps for show. Her feet were still tender, but luckily for her, Korra healed fast. And now that she thought of it, the idea that anybody but her was handling something as personal as the things against her skin was somewhat... disturbing. Especially now that she was all alone in this place, this time. Having control over something this trivial was a tiny piece of mental security she would really like to have.

But despite all her theatrics, a frown appeared on Kaya's face, foretelling the things to come.

.

.

.

Thirty minutes later, she was standing at the front door of Angerut Illautiwok with the wind blasting at her face, her feet raw and wrapped in a layer of wool socks and fur boots. The scourge of her mental well-being was standing three steps away, nodding attentively at Kaya.

"Now you take her here." Kaya instructed the boy. "And here, this is who she needs to see..."

Korra tuned them out, preferring the wind than looking at the two of them discussing... stuffs.

Just how the heck did it come to this? She still couldn't wrap her head around it. The logic of it! It boggled the mind! Nevermind that she was right there, bearing witness.

"Alright, Korra. Go with him." Kaya called her. Numbly, she clumped a few steps through the snow, heading towards Mini-Amon. The lil' brat gave her a look all over, like a buffalo-yak trainer assessing a wild yak to see if this thing was going to be a lot of pain to the behind and whether she was worth the effort. Whatever he concluded in his head, he kept it to himself. Mini-Amon simply nodded at her, jerked his head, said quietly "Try to keep up." And then he was off, walking briskly down the road.

She followed him mechanically, taking her first proper venture out into this world for the first time since coming here.

* * *

**End Chapter 5**

* * *

1. This chapter is a bit longer than usual. Mainly because it was supposed to come out awhile ago. The reason as to why I've been so slow on updating is a personal one: I just got a promotion. I was a staff writer for an e-news publication four months ago. Now I'm their junior editor with my own team of staff writers. I also freelance write for an expat print magazine and several other webzines. It's taken a helluva toll on my free time. All of my fanfic plans were pushed back. I've got somewhat of a better hang on my job now. I can write a lot faster too (a result of a lot of freelance writings and huge paychecks from independent publishers) Hopefully the updates will come out quicker. I've already got some material going on for the next chapter of Book Air and is hoping to release it within a month. As you can see, I'm on something of a roll right now. In under three weeks, I've updated all three of my major on-going fics. Lets all hope this is a long roll.

2. My tumblr has pretty much been abandoned these last few months. I've got a few mails I never found the time to answer, and I'm sorry for that. As said above, I've been busy. Unlike the majority of fanfictioner, I'm an adult. I have a job. I need to support myself and my family. I have dreams and goals beside getting such and such amount of reviews, follows, and favs. Those things are pretty much meaningless to me as a published author and writer. I'll try to find sometimes to answer these mails, but there's not a lot I can promise.

3. The cultural and quasi-religious aspects of this chapter is a product of mine, based on Inuit social culture (the bathing part and social sharing part), a name picked from Mediterranean pantheon, basic geology and meteorology of Arctic regions and some personal hypotheses on how it would affect a culture such as the Water Tribe, and some story weaving of my own. This is the part I most enjoy in writing: building a culture, building a world, building a character. IMO, majority of fanfictioners don't really appreciate these A-B-C blocks of writing. They have little appreciation for the beauty and nuances of cultures, lores, religions, and the making of them for a story or a world in the story. The pleasure of creating a complex, layered and human character instead of relying on cliches, overused archetypes and descriptions of supposedly very sexy/trendy clothes. It's all either just 'boom-pow-paff- power trip' or 'shag each other's brains out for no reason but the mental wanking of a bunch of teenagers and horny twenty-something' for them.

And yes, that was my old geezer romanticist self just unleashed you youngsters. (Get offa my lawn, punks!). Kidding.

4. Unbetaed, so I'd really appreciate it if you can point out any grammatical mistakes or typos I made.

5. In case you wonder, why is Korra so afraid of Half-Dark? Well, imagine the Sahara desert is filled with hidden quick sand fields. Now, somebody just ask you to go deep in there and live there for half a year. How do you feel? Half-Dark is basically just like that. There's not a lot of TV screentime for the harsh condition of the North Pole (which is the model for Half-Dark in this story), but this is a fact. Go search it up and you will see. The Pole's hostile condition is the one reason why neither of them are colonized and legally and practically belong to any country in the world. There's been incursion attempts into these two extremes of Earth, but very limited success.


	6. Chapter 6

Disclaimer: I do not own Legend of Korra and its characters

Beta: Michelle Tran

_**Book Air**_

Premise: To regain her bending, Korra must make a choice, go back to the past and either kill a teenage Noatak, or save him. But things are never as simple as they appear to be.

**Chapter 6: The Disconnect**

* * *

'This is all so... weird!' Thought Korra as she trudged through the snow and followed the infernal hellspawn that dared copy her hairdo through the village path. Around her, Emeq buzzed and bustled the tune of daily life in its own sleepy way. Children chased each other in zig zags around camps. Women worked the skinning bench and the drying perch, laying out strips of wet sealgoat meat to dry. They passed by an old dame washing newly skinned leathers by a small creek.

'So, so weird' She thought again, watching everything and everyone around her with wide eyes. This looked like it came straight out of her childhood, this quaint little picture of a small, no-name Water Tribe village with its small, no-name Water Tribe people. It felt as though Korra hadn't gone twenty-six years into the past, but only around thirteen or so years, back to the time when she was still living with her parents in the midst of a small settlement in the frontier of the South Pole.

Everything was the same, or at least, the same as the hazy images stored in her mind from the time when she was four and could barely remember the first three syllables of the Water Tribe alphabet. The people, the landscapes, the clothings and houses. Her mother was Southern, but her father was pure Northern... and of royal blood. He built their igloo from good ol' Northern stocks, and her mother, in a bid to soothe her husband's prevalent homesickness, sewed all their clothes in Northern vogue. It felt as though, if she blinked, they would appear right in front of her, right now, wearing their good old homemade parka and completely at home in this far-flung Northern village.

A child ran past her on the village path, screaming giddily as his playmates pelted him with snowballs the size of rice bowl.

Snowballs!? Korra shooked her head. Whoever played snowballs anymore? She couldn't remember the last time she had played that good ol' Water Tribe children pastime. Four? Five? Past her fourth birthday, she had been forced to move into the Lotus compound. A whole fortress built for the purpose of protecting the child Avatar. There was a whole lot of ice and snow in that fortress, but no snowballs for as long as she could remember. She was the only child there, and as much as the Lotus guards and servants wanted to please a homesick four years old, it seemed they were only willing to go as far as their duties told them to. So no snowball games for lil' Korra.

She felt something fill her chest, warm, but uncomfortable, like burning coal. Somehow, she could still recall the feeling of a snowball in her hand. Cold, and wet, and melting, its solid weight on her palm, and a childish joy like feathers on her face and in her belly. _Throw the ball!_ It said to her. _Throw it!_

"Hey! Don't lag behind." The voice snapped her out of her thoughts. She jerked away from the playing children. Mini-Amon was standing maybe ten paces away, looking at her with hands in pockets and mild impatience painted on his face. It occurred to her that this was about the second time he had spoken to her since that 'disastrous first meeting'.

"Right... I'm coming." She mumbled, picking up her pace. She was too startled to actually object to anything he might say to her. Besides, this was his home village, his turf. She was already on shaky enough ground. She didn't want to start more trouble over stuffs like this.

The very notion that she was now backing away from a... potential fight... with mini-Amon of all people, put a wry smile in her head. It was testament to how much things had changed... and how Korra was effected by it.

Wouldn't Tenzin be proud? She had a feeling he wouldn't... ahh, but what would she pay just to hear his disgruntled scolding in her ears right now.

As they cleared the way to the village gate, Korra wrestled with her chaotic emotions. Deja vu was the name of the game here. She felt... like she had gone back to a home she had forgotten long ago, but at the same time, strangely out of place. The first four years of her life was spent on a tiny settlement on the ass-end of nowhere, just like this. The next twelve and a half year was dry as bone monastery life. And then the last half year, Republic City, like a brightly burning light in her mind.

Emeq was nothing like Republic City. While the big R was all razzle-dazzle, Emeq touched something deep in her, something she hadn't remembered for a long time. It was like... like going back home after thirteen years... and realizing that home hadn't changed one bit. That everything was the same, and the only thing that changed... was her. Korra wasn't sure what she felt about that.

Past the village gate, which was marked by twin inukshuk rock formations, she followed Mini-Amon wordlessly, running after him in the dirt path leading out. They left the hubbub of the village behind in about ten paces or so, the noises of daily life fading with each step.

Ahead, all was white and blue. The beaten dirt path drew a zig-zagging line around several snow hills before disappearing into the murky line separating the snow and the skies. They walked with the light of the Hazing Sun at their back, chasing their shadows on the road.

Korra watched Mini-Amon from his back, eyes going up and down on his bobbing ponytail. She gritted her teeth. Her feet hurt something badly. The new skin chafed against the linen bindings. She thought she might be bleeding from her ice-burned soles and the tender parts in between her toes, but she wasn't sure. Behind the pain, there was a numbness that suggested the ice had burned away parts of the nerves.

_I can walk my ass!_ She thought glumly to herself. That was what she said to Kaya a mere half hour ago, trying to prove that she was well enough to go gallivanting to the outside world... but it turned out a lot of that was just plain old blustering. Her feet might be on their way to completely healed, but they still weren't in any shape to go snow stomping, much less taking on a several mile long trek from one village to another.

But she couldn't turn back now. The thought of mini-Amon buying the things that would sit next to her skin for the next few days burned. The fact that he wouldn't know about it made her feel no better. So she gritted her teeth, and pushed on, walking faster and faster, until she matched mini-Amon pace for pace, until she was walking side-by-side with him. She wanted to get this done and over as fast as she could.

They walked on in silence, two tiny blue dots in the encompassing white and off blue of the landscape. Then she saw him glancing at her from the corner of her eyes, his gaze going from her face to her feet. A crease appeared between his eyes.

"Stubborn..." He said under his breath, but she heard it anyway. Out here in the tundra, there was no noisy crowd to drown out the things that came from their mouths. She could hear his breath in the silence, the rustling of his clothes.

"What's that?" She snapped.

In the first second, mini-Amon was silent. He kept on walking without so much as a pause, not acknowledging her. Then the next second he stopped suddenly and turned to face her in full. Korra stopped too, her breath coming out wet and ragged from her mouth and her nostrils. She had sweat running down her face and a damp patch hanging at the small of her back. The pain from her feet hang around her head like an invisible shroud. Her body tensed, poising for a fight.

It looked like it couldn't be avoided after all. Too bad for not wanting to start trouble in his turf. But in that case, bring it on! Korra could as well do with a good fisticuff now anyway. Anything to stop the throbbing pain in her feet, anything to stop the burning headache in her skull.

But what followed was absolutely out of her imagination. Mini-Amon stared at her, not saying a word. He looked at her face, then down at her feet, then back up again. There was a funny expression in his face, like he was trying to swallow something bad.

"What are you looking at?" She snapped again, irritated. The crease in between Mini-Amon's eyes deepened. Then he took his hands out of his pocket, holding them spread-fingered and open in front of him. It was a gesture meant for her to see, like he was saying 'look, I got nothing to hide' to her with his hands. He took one small step forward, closer to Korra, slow and deliberate, like how a tamer would move around a wild buffalo-yak.

"What are..." She started, but before she could finish that, he was already moving forward again, and down. She jerked, caught by surprise. Then the next thing she knew, she was standing, looking down to a kneeling Mini-Amon at her feet.

And her feet...

... oh...

He moved his hands a little. Immediately, she felt the working of healing Waterbending. There was nothing to do about the blood that had soaked and damped its way to the outer skin of her fur boots, but the burning sensation was slowly but steadily receding.

It felt... it felt... good.

She stood there, gobsmacked as Mini-Amon worked his healing magic over her bleeding feet. There was a disconnect in her mind... Amon? Healing? Her feet?! It didn't compute. The Amon in her head was a monster and a blood bender, not a healer.

"Sit down." She heard his voice as though over a veil, then she felt hands pulling and pushing until she was sitting down on the ground, with pockets of free floating water supporting her back.

Water Bending, and he didn't even move a finger to make them float. Korra was so dazed she didn't even have the mind to feel jealous. Instead, she watched disbelievingly as he worked his way around her feet.

Three-fourths of her boots were soaked in her own blood. He pulled the strings holding them to her shins, then pulled them off her. They made a wet splash on the ground. There was blood coming... sloshing... out of the fur shafts, she saw. The bandages Kaya put on her this morning were a bloody mess.

He gave her a look that said something like '_do you see what you did there?_'.

"So what..." She bit out, more out of reflex than any real intention to pick a fight. Her words lacked their usual barbs. In reply, he raised an eyebrow.

Really?

Before she could think of a comeback to that, he had already turned away and back to her legs. In the next few minutes, there was nothing but the sound of Arctic wind and the distant beating of the waves going by them, that and the quiet rustling of bandages coming off. Mini-Amon didn't say a word, and she, Korra, was too busy trying to keep her mouth closed and not let out even a whimper of pain. When the bandages finally came off, it became clear that she had been a fool.

Mini-Amon picked up one leg, holding it from the shin as he studied the swollen, purplish toes.

"Inflammation." He said simply. "Untreated, it will grow gangrenous." Another look at her, a repeat of his earlier _'do you see what you did there?_' look. Its similarity with the exasperated look Katara used to give her made her nauseous. In response to his silent question, she kept her mouth shut this time, her face white from the pain. Then he started healing her, and with the first lick of healing waterbending, the pain and the pressure receded.

It took a scant five minutes. Shocking. If she hadn't been there to watch him work, she wouldn't have believed Mini-Amon, the precursor to the terror he'd become in the future, possessed such degree of healing skill. But she was there, and she saw it all. She didn't think she had ever seen anyone that good with healing except for Katara and her disciples before. Her feet, bleeding and swollen mere minutes before, were now healed, not completely, but they were in far better shape than they had ever been since Korra crash landed in this time period. She wiggled her toes, watching the baby pink skin stretch and give. Then she looked back at Mini-Amon, speechless.

The feeling in her chest right now was of a person pushed further and further out of her comfort zone. It was like Kyoshi had drop-kicked her to twilight zone and not to the past. This was not how she had imagined her first outing with Amon the Kid would be like. This was not how she had imagined her interaction with Amon of any time period would be like. This was not how she imagined he would be, period. The pain she had endured for the past several days had almost gone away, and her head clear, but despite this, it seemed her confusion could only grow larger and larger with every day she stayed here. And she didn't know how to deal with that. It wasn't like she could firebend... or punch... confusion in the face until it quit bugging her.

Unknowing of Korra's inner confusion, the source of her problem carried on without a thought as to what was going on in her head. Mini-Amon picked up the dirty bandages and did a waterbending trick with them.

Here in his village, it was called stingy healer's bandages. He suffused them in salt water, taking care to push the sodium content up above what was normal for sea water, then held them there until he was sure they were sterilized off any germs. When he pulled the water back out, every drop of it, the blood, clot, and dead skin cells were taken along as it went. Within minutes, he had transformed a wad of used and dirty rags into brand new bandages.

Waste not want not was the motto of life for his people. And out here, where they couldn't grow their own cotton field, a simple string of cotton bandage was a small fortune.

He set to rebandaging the girl's wounds. Foolish, was the word he had for her, though he was too polite to say that to her face. Or maybe touched in the head. That wouldn't be impossible with the way she was tearing herself up with injuries after injuries since the day he fished her out from the sea. If this kept up, he suspected she may become a permanent fixture in Kaya's temple... that or buried herself in impossible hospital debts to the village healer. Oh well, at least this one he did for her would be on the house.

He worked quick and clean, winding the bandages and tieing them tight. Once he was done, he turned up and said.

"Go back."

"What...?"

"Go back." He repeated. "We haven't gone that far. You can make it back to Kaya on your own. I'll go to the market alone and get whatever it is that you want."

"I... what... No! No! I'm coming with you!"

He felt the first lick of irritation. This girl... "Stop being stubborn." He said slowly, keeping a tight rein over his voice. He had a feeling he would need a lot of patience when dealing with this brat of a girl. "You obviously can't make the trip. I may have stopped the bleeding but you are a far way away from walking four miles from here to the market." He pointed at her bloody boots for emphasis. "What are you going to do? Crawl?"

That stopped Korra dead in her tracks. He was right. She hadn't thought about that, and that was the entire reason as to why she was sitting on her butt out here in the middle of the North Pole tundra field, with her feet out and bare in the cold Arctic air, listening to the the teenage self of her worst enemy berating her for her thoughtlessness.

Unbidden, she thought of what she could do if she still had her bending with her. With waterbending, she could have easily healed herself back to tip top shape in the last few days. With firebending, she could have kept herself warm and cozy even in the harshest part of the pole and not shivering and snivelling like a wet crow-rat wrapped in layers of coats. With earthbending, she could have gone from here to that bedamned market in two seconds flat. If she still had her bending, she wouldn't be here, here as in twenty six years into the past in this freakish land with this freakish water tribe village, to begin with.

What she could do if she had her bending back. But she didn't. She was a nonbender, a weak, helpless fleshbag like the countless one she had thrown around in her raids into the Equalist base.

It stung.

"I don't know..." She bit out finally, feeling the frustration at her own helplessness bubble and simmer right under the surface, threatening to overflow her. She hated it! She hated being the helpless girl everyone had to take care of. "... but you're not going without me."

"Stop acting like a child. How old are you?" She heard the first hint of annoyance in his voice, and despite herself, it made her smile a little in her head.

"Seventeen. How old are **you**?" She pointed a finger in his face, his clean baby face. She could still see a hint of baby fat in his cheeks and along his jawline, softening up his feature. He couldn't be more than fifteen. He was a frigging kid! She bet he hadn't even had his first pimple yet. Hah! Wouldn't that be a sight? Amon with puberty pimples. She almost wished she had given in to Tarrlok and his truckload of gifts right then and there. She still remembered seeing one of those paparazzi point-and-snap thing that made pictures in that one load he had sent to the Air monastery. What would she give to have a picture of teenager Amon with pimples on his face? She'd hang it above her bed and go to sleep looking at it. She bet she would never have another Amon-related nightmare for as long as it stayed there above her bed.

"Fourteen." Mini-Amon almost spat out. "And acting way more mature than you." He had stood up straight in the middle of their spontaneous verbal throw down and was now towering over her in all his fourteen years old height. Not to be outdone herself, Korra stood up too, wobbling a little bit on her newly healed feet. They smarted a little, but were otherwise fine... for now.

"Oh yeah? Good for you." She was in his face now, their noses inches away from each other. Typical Water Tribe stocks had her seventeen years old height at around the same as his fourteen years old. Another year and it would be Korra who had to look up. "But you are not going anywhere without me. End of discussion." Just for kick, she added in. "What are ya gonna do? Drag me kicking and screaming back to the village? Wouldn't that be a sight hmm?"

Now it was his turn to stop dead. There was an incredulous look on his face, like he couldn't believe what she was saying.

_Oh, you better believe it bitch_. She thought to herself. _Cause that's what I want and you gotta deal with it!_

"So what's it gonna be huh, Mister I'm way more mature than you?" She added after a full minute of staring into Mini-Amon's face and not hearing a word in answer. "Tick tock, buddy." She said, smiling, sneering. She got him in a bind and she knew it. "My feet ain't getting any better. What would Kaya say when we limp back to her place huh? The perfect no-fault Mister Mature-Fourteen-Years-Old not being able to take care of one sickly and confused girl she entrusted him with. And just so you know, the moment you think you can leave me here and go off snow surfing outta this place, I'll be on your tail, and I won't quit until either my feet drop off or you come back and do as I say."

She watched his face lose that first incredulous look, calm down, quickly come to grip with what he was hearing. She can see the clocks and gears turning in that head of his, hear him quietly consider his options. Korra may not understand what went on in that fruity brain of the big Amon, freak that he was, but this mini version she can read, if only a little. She knew his type. He was a male version of Jinora, all prim and proper, except the prim in his case was rigid as rock. Proper little Jinora hated being shown her shortcomings. Korra'd bet her ass this fourteen years old brat liked it no better than Tenzin's perfect little lady. So she just needed to put down her feet and stick to it, and he'd cave. She just knew it.

Then she saw something coming onto Mini-Amon's face, a look of intention, pointed at her. And then suddenly she wasn't so sure anymore.

* * *

'How did it come to this?' Korra thought as they came sliding down a snow hill, ice and melting water spraying everywhere around them. 'Just how in the hell did I let him put me in a corner?' They cleared the last hill in a matter of minutes. The whole trip, from that one spot where they last stopped to the clearing where the four-village market was held took thirty minutes, tops. She knew. She had had plenty experience playing at snow surfing before. What kind of waterbender would she be if she hadn't known that? But in all her life, this would be the first time her entire ride was spent clinging onto someone else's back.

Mini-Amon made a smooth, graceful stop, holding the slide until it petered down to an end right at the foot of the hill. Immediately, Korra shot off of his back, then scooted three more steps away just for good measure. She eyed him warily, flushing. It took all her will not to shiver uncontrollably or beat her hands against the front of her coat in an attempt to chase away the warmth still lingering there. She could hear him on her, a distinct mixture of sun light, sea salt, cedar wood, and fish oil. That was what Mini-Amon smelt like. A piece of knowledge she neither wanted nor needed, but it was lodged firmly there in the back of her mind either way. Korra's look turned into a glare at the thought. The flush on her face deepened angrily.

He returned her look in kind.

"You were the one who wanted to come no matter what." He said, patting down his coat.

"But... piggybacking?" She mumbled.

"I didn't hear any better idea coming from you, did I?" True. She hadn't thought that through when she was trying to get that condescending look off his face earlier. In retrospect, it was she who pushed herself into a corner. Twilight land, she thought again, this whole village... time period... whatever... was doing funny things to her head. She turned away and towards the market, unwilling to pursue that line of thoughts.

The market—that was how people around here called it, simply market or occasionally the four-village market, 'cause there was no other market but it within a hundred mile wide diameter so there was no need to distinguish it from any other - resided in a patch of land between a range of snow hills and the sea, right smack dab in between four villages. A simple square of flat land with dirt, patches of bone-white prairie and a whole lot of snow. The sea carved a curve into the earth, creating a mini crescent shape bay. There was a small port in the bay, with kayak boats going in and out, bearing things to trade. The main market sat on the coast next to the port, with wood panels trawling out from the beach into the water. There were maybe a dozen stalls on the land market, and around half a dozen more floating on the waves in double-loaded kayaks. The market gave off a cacophony of noises over the background sound of the constant ebb and flow of the sea and the wind, noises of people talking, walking, running, eating, their lips smacking and throats swallowing. The click-clacking of things being held up, then put down. The bleating of ox-goats. The cracking of a burning fire.

From far away, she saw columns of white smoke rising up from a corner of the market. The wind came in from the sea, carrying with it the scent of the smoke and of breakfast cooking over bonfire. It smelt like barbecue, and steaks. Good old Northern Style steak with the sauce. Well maybe not the sauce. The sauce was imported, from Earth kingdom, but steak by itself was already a little piece of heaven. Korra's stomach rumbled. It occurred to her that the entire time she was at Kaya, she had been surviving on a diet of soups and gruels and some more juices. Her stomach literally churned for some of that good old juicy red meat.

"All yours." Said Mini-Amon as he dangled a coin pouch in her face, cutting her gourmand day dream in the middle. She snatched it up, throwing him a dirty look. Then before he could say another word to ruin her day, she headed to the market. Her newly healed feet felt tight and tender and probably couldn't yet take another trek back home, but she knew she was good as long as she kept a slow and careful pace. The throngs of people swallowed her in seconds, and she thought she might have left Mini-Amon behind... or maybe he didn't follow. Well either was fine by her. Before long she was standing right in front the place where they dish out the steaks in wooden plates. She stood there in front of a small queue, looking at the sign. It said...

_**2 coppers... no return, no exchange**_

She held the coin pouch tight in her hand, feeling the coins inside through a layer of thin hemp cloth. She counted... two, three, four... four coins. She opened the pouch, looked inside. They were copper coins. There went her hope of four shiny silver coins in her pouch. She closed and tied the pouch with a huff.

"Stingy old crone..." She mumbled to herself.

"Ey... you gonna buy or not?" The stall owner pointed a grill poke at her, then at the line of people waiting behind her. She looked at the sizzling grill, swallowed.

"Uh.. no thanks."

"Then get the hell out of here and let me _customers_ through."

She slunk off like a mouse, the pouch clutched in her hands. The coins jingled and jangled as she walked.

Money.

**Money**.

_Money_ was turning out to be the newest and biggest thing she was having to swallow these days. She needed money to eat. She needed money for clothes. She needed money for her healing. She owed Kaya apparently a whole bunch of money. They asked her money just to stay a few more weeks at the village. Money was how people communicated, like these folks shopping around her. The put out the coins and the deal was made. No words required but just a few numbers.

Money was like a power in its own... like a bending power that stood apart from the great four, except she didn't ever see anybody trying to moneybend before. For such an important thing, one would think the Lotus should have prepared her for its influence, but no. It was international politics instead, and history of the world. And now she was left here on her own, trying to learn the ropes of a game in which she was introduced to seventeen years later than everyone else by trial and failure.

Well, a fat lot of good history and politics were to her now.

To be honest, she wanted nothing more than to go back to that street grills and ordered as much as she could stuff into her throats and left the consequences for other people to deal with.. cause she was the Avatar and always somebody else picked up her mess. Just like that one time with the barbecue lady when she first came to Republic City, and then that other time when she tore up the streets with her earthbending. But then she had to remind herself that there was nobody here to pick up after her no more. No Tenzin, no disgruntled Lotus Guards. It was just her... and the consequences waiting to happen. It would be so easy to fall back into her old patterns, throw up her hands and not care. But during the last few weeks she was starting to learn that without her bending powers, the world operated on a different rule set. And the consequences... it wasn't like she could bend consequences outta the window.

So... no steaks. Clothes it was.

She found the clothing stalls bobbing up and down on the waves, and stood by almost exclusively middle age ladies. She circled the wood panels going out into the water, eyeing the floating stalls until one of them waved her over. she hesitated for a second, before deciding to leave it all to hell and went in.

"Shopping for the new season?" Said the shop lady, a plump, happy looking forty-something with a fur pelt and bird feathers on her head. "What are you looking for?"

"Uh..." Said Korra very eloquently, eyeing birdy lady's merchandise. The entire shop took up the whole front of the double-loaded kayak, with all kinds of clothes and furs sitting pell-mell on the driftwood nose of the boat and filling the deck hatch; the whole thing bobbing up and down every time the waves came in. She took in a deep breath. The smell of damp clothes and epoxy resin filled her nose. It figured, these things probably had been sitting out here in the open since morning.

She tried again and all that came out was: "Umm..."

Now this wasn't exactly a secret, because Korra had better things to keep as secrets than something that silly, but the truth was... she didn't know how to shop for clothes. What she wore had always been chosen for her by the Lotus elders. Sure she '_demanded_' things now and then, her tank tops for example, but for the major parts, what went on in her closet was mostly out of her hand, and had been since she was four years old. It wasn't like there was a fashion shop open for business in the Lotus Compound in the deep South Pole. Same thing with the Air Monastery. So as it turned out, this would be the first time ever that Korra shopped for her own clothes.

She gave a third try, pointing a finger vaguely at the pile. "Can I..." She started. Sensing her inexperience, Birdy Lady cut right in.

"How about this one? This is your size." She held up a dress, powder blue with a boat neck. No complaints here except Korra would really like some pants. She was growing sick of running around in old dresses. She shook her head, kneeling down on both legs so that she was on almost the same level with birdy lady and her bouncing boat. She tried to make sense out of the pile of clothings in front of her. It couldn't be that hard. She just needed something comfortable. The end. She didn't need the fancy things like the ones in Asami's closet.

But then it started to get weird.

"No? How about this one? The boys love it. How about you try it on?"

"What? What do boys have..." She looked at the new dress in birdy lady's hand. She couldn't see how it was any different than the first dress.

"Oh I saw you coming in with that young man. How very cute you were, clinging to him like that. Ahh, youths these day. Now if it was a decade ago, you can be sure that was not how it went around here." There was a half scandalous undertone to birdy lady's voice as she twittered. "So... is he your..." She held up her pinky.

"What... No! No, he's not! He's..." Korra jerked back, burned and horrified. "He's my... uh... my..." She stuttered, momentarily unsure of what to give as a safe answer.

"Her guide. I'm her guide." A voice cut in from behind her. She turned, and there was the pain in her backside given human form. "You!" She screeched. "You followed me! You... sicko!"

"You were taking too long. I've got stuff to do, and it didn't look like you knew where you were going," Mini-Amon replied, nonchalantly. He wasn't even looking at her, but at birdy lady's stuffs. "How are your feet?"

If Korra didn't know better, she would have thought the question was for somebody else and not her, the way it was put out so casually and directed anywhere but at her. Birdy lady, however, had absolutely zero difficulty in pinpointing who the question was for.

"Ooh, he cares!" Said Birdy Lady, cheeks flushed pink with amusement and her eyes snapping back and forth between Korra and the bane of her existence. "Guide, huh? Is that what you youngsters call it these days?"

"No!" Said Korra, eyes wide and nearly shaking with horror.

"I just don't want to have to heal her again on the way back. She's a handful." Said Mini-Amon, not missing a beat. "She lost all her clothes when she passed by my village. Bandits. She needs some new ones." He carried on before any can interject, getting right to the point.

"Oh, you poor dear."

"She just need something comfortable. A good coat, clothes for day work and something she can sleep in. If she needs anything else we can get them later on."

"Hey, back off pal! It's my clothes. I'm the one who should do the talking." Korra jumped right in. Like hell she'd let this brat be the one who chose what she wore.

"Of course..." He drawled. His face wore a long-suffering expression that said he wasn't surprised in the least. "In that case, please tell us what you want."

"Uhh... something comfortable..."

"I just said that."

"Yeah? Well I want to be the one who say that. What I wear is none of your business. When your mother does her shopping do you stick to her butt and nag like that too? Now get out of my face and go away. Shoo!"

Mini-Amon rolled his eyes, and, apparently having already decided that he didn't want to deal with her big mouth and the scene they were causing, walked away without another word.

With the source of her annoyance finally gone, she turned back to Birdy lady, who was grinning all the way. "Anyway, pants. No dresses. I don't like dresses. They are so hard to run in. And tunics. Do you have something easy to move in?" She leaned forward, pulling at the pile. She found lots of fur and cured leather and some wool. The fabric felt coarse and thick to her hands, not the silky lightness of her old clothes. Secretly, she had been hoping something similar to her old getup would be here, lying before naked eyes in one of these stalls and up for grasps in seconds. That would make her job so much easier.

"We do have some cotton and linen." Said Birdy Lady. "But they are imported. They are going to cost you."

Oh, right. Things didn't come for free. She had forgotten it again. The smile on her face died. She fingered the coin pouch, hesitated for a second before offering it on two hands to Birdy Lady. "This is all I have with me now. Is it enough?" Birdy Lady took the pouch from her, untied it then upended it on her hand. Four copper coins rolled out. She looked at them for a second then made a clucking sound.

"Well, we do have some cotton secondhands. They are a bit worn around the edges but fine otherwise. They will see you for at least several more winters that I can guarantee."

"That's totally fine with me."

With that decided, Birdy Lady pulled from within the pile the promised secondhand cotton pants and tunics and they settled down to a comfortable routine of picking out the ones that might fit Korra then whittled down that selection with the ones she liked.

"I also need some...um..." She pulled at the neck of her coat and dress until it became clear to Birdy Lady that she didn't have a bra on her. "I lost those too. Uh... bandits, right. Thieves, the lot of them!"

"Ohh..." An expression came over on the shop keeper's face, revelation and amusement. She had a hand over her mouth as she said the next line, like she was sharing juicy gossip with Korra "Is that why you chased him away? You wanted it to be a surprise didn't you?"

"What the hell is wrong with you?!" For a moment there, Korra thought blood might have busted out from her ears. Her face was burning up like a kettle in the firebender practice yard.

"Now, now, dear, no need to shout. Let an old woman have her fun, will you? It's so rare to see young people around this place nowadays. And what was I supposed to think when you came in all cozy and snuggly on his back?"

She had a point, but that point was something Korra didn't want to consider. Not in a million years.

"Well... well... that's none of your business. And we're not... we're not... eww" Korra tried to think of Mako. Yes, her dear Mako with the chiseled face, not that pansy little brat who plagiarised her hairdo. It looked like crap on him anyway. Too girly!

"Fine, fine." Birdy Lady concurred as she pulled a plastic bag the size of a Satomobile wheel from the deck hatch. She untied it and pushed it at Korra. "Have your pick. They are new" She dug in, wincing at the course materials. If it were going to sit on her skin, then she wanted something soft and nice at least, and she was willing to pay a little more for that too.

But... urgh... just look at this stuff. So coarse and... non-stretchy. Was this what the women of this time period had to deal with? If that was so then she was so glad she was born years later. Or maybe it was just this one backwater settlement. They had the look about them. For a full five minutes she searched with her hands, feeling the rough fabric scratching her fingers, trying to find that same silky softness she had grown used to. It couldn't be that hard. As far as she knew, the stuffs they used to make her old clothes were nothing special. She lived in a monastery, not a frigging high-society palace or something. There had gotta be something in there.

Then she hit the bottom of the bag, and there she felt something brushed against the tip of her fingers. It felt soft and cool to the touch. She fished it up out of fifty inches of women panties and bras. Her face lightened up the moment she saw it, held it in her hands. It wasn't anywhere nearly as good as what she had, but it was already a whole lot better than what she had seen coming from this place so far.

"That's silk, imported from Fire Nation." Said Birdy Lady. "That's going to cost you a whole lot, girl. I don't think you have the money for that."

"I do have something else." Replied Korra as she clutched the silk slip and panties tight in one hand. Her other hand went inside her coat, pulled out the only intact thing left from her old outfit. The decorative rock sewn to the collar of her old parka. She figured she had no use for it left. It looked real shiny though, so maybe it was worth a little. "Can I trade this with you instead?"

The moment she held the rock out in the open, it caught light, and glinted a soft blue under the Hazing Sun. Birdy Lady's eyes suddenly grew wide, and her mouth formed an O.

Korra perked up. So maybe it was worth a lot. Maybe she can get more nice stuff with it.

"Hey, can I get..."

Before she can finish that line though, somebody clutched her by the hand and yanked it down. Then a voice came out cold and angry from her left.

"What do you think you are doing?" Mini-Amon's face was inches away from her, and for the first time, she thought she saw something like anger, real anger, in it. She jerked away from him.

"You again? Would you quit bothering me? What's it to you anyway huh? This is mine. I can do whatever I the hell want with it. It's just a shiny rock anyway."

If it was possible, the expression on Mini-Amon's face grew even colder. He was dead quiet for maybe a second, and when he finally spoke, it sounded like he'd just made a revelation he didn't like in the least.

"You really are just a spoilt rich brat, aren't you?" As he said this, he let go of Korra's hand. The gesture felt like he was letting go entirely. Something in his voice stopped her from firing off in retaliation. He sounded... disappointed?

"That rock as you put it, can feed my entire village for a year." He made a pointing gesture at the bauble. "It's also the last link you have to your past and the only thing you have of value right now, and you are just going to throw it away like that? Did you think about what you're going to do once you've spent it all? How are you going to feed yourself? You barely know how to work. Or are you just going to live off of Kaya? She's not rich you know. None of us are."

Korra reared back, stunned. She had no reply to the questions Mini-Amon was throwing at her. Before she could think of something to say though, he had already carried on.

"But then again, that's none of my business, isn't it?" He stood up , dusted his hands. "Do what you want." He said, then turned his back and in mere seconds he was gone, swallowed up in the throngs of people, leaving her shocked to speechlessness on the wood panel ground.

"He's right you know." Birdy Lady's voice pulled her back. She turned to look at the shop keeper and saw that she had none of the happy-go-lucky look she had worn for the entirety of their conversation. "You should listen to your boy." She took the empty coin pouch, and took Korra gently by the hand. She covered the decorative rock with the pouch, then closed Korra's hand around it. "Don't show this at places like this. You'll only attract troubles to yourself. You never know for sure what kind of no-good people are looking at you."

No-good people? Korra looked around and caught several people turning away. But they could have just as easily been attracted by the ruckus she and Mini-Amon was making. She looked back at Birdy Lady, confused and at a loss for words.

_It was just a rock!_ She thought to herself. _A shiny one._ The Lotus elders gave her one every year, and so did some of the Lotus Guards. She had a trunk full of them in her room back in the Lotus Compound. She played rock skipping in the backyard pond with them!

"Tell you what..." Birdy Lady said as she picked up the stuffs Korra chose, the clothes, the fur hat for particularly cold days, the scarves and the good coat, even the imported silk underwears. "You can have all these for four coppers. It's on me." She added on when she saw Korra about to protest. There was a look of pity on her face. "Don't think about it. See it as a good luck charm. I have a feeling you are going to need it kid." Then she wrapped the clothes all up in a bundle and pushed them into Korra's hands.

.

.

.

Mini-Amon waited for her on the outskirt of the market, passed the lines of market goers. He didn't say a word when he gave her his hand and pulled her on his back. He didn't say anything else either on their way back. Korra too stayed silent. All the way, all she could think about was:

_Feed an entire village? For a year? _

That feeling when she first discovered the gravity of money and other things they never taught her in the Lotus monastery surfaced again. For a moment back there, she genuinely thought she was finally getting the hang of it, but in the end, it seemed like she was just starting to realize how out of depth she was.

* * *

**End Chapter 6**

* * *

1. Lots of teenager headbutting in this chapter. What do you think of Korra and Noatak's interaction? And yes, Korra will keep referring to him in her head as Mini-Amon or Amon the Kid until she saw him as a person and realized that he wasn't yet the same as the Amon in her head, that he was a kid, and very much like her. That will be in the next chapter I think.

2. Brought up by my beta. On Korra's playin rock skipping in the backyard pond. It's a big pond, it opens to an inland bay.

3. I really, seriously enjoy building up Korra's character. I feel that she was done a disservice in the show. On first look, she's a very hard to root for protagonist, a selfish brat who just wants everything her way and never actually conquers her fear. But I feel she is a far more complex character than that, and I want to explore that hidden, wasted depth of her in this story. I hope you are with me in this.

4. The first hint of the promised romance in this chapter. I'm betting some of you really like it. Still, my motto is always characters and story before romance.

5. This part is written on the behalf of Rosetta at Home. It has nothing to do with my stories or my writings or even myself. It is simply a plea for anyone who's willing to pay a little attention to the welfare of the community, a little cyber volunteer work, if you will (So you don't have to read it if you're not interested. But please, it only takes five minutes, and I'm pretty sure you've already spent hours reading what I write so what's five more minutes?).

Donate your computer processing power to Rosetta at Home!

Rosetta at Home: is a distributed computing project to solve the mystery of how the human protein strings fold, and from there discover the key to curing all diseases, including AIDS, cancer, flu, autoimmune disorders.

In layman's terms, no supercomputer is up to the task of calculating all the possible ways a human protein strings can fold into itself (like the ways a shoestring dropping into a carton box would look like, the possibilities are endless), so this project has to be done communally by a large group of computers. Rosetta at Home is a software that only works when your computer is idle or is using a very small percentage of the processing power (e.g. when you go to class and forget to turn down your laptop, when you fall asleep while writing your midterm essays, while you are reading the news from your office computer, etc...) to compute protein folding and find the 'golden folds'.

This project has gone on for some years now, organized by Baker Laboratory of the University of Washington. I got into it when a friend introduced it to me partly because I felt this was a very small thing I could do (I figure if my laptop can run Mass Effect 3 on high quality then Rosetta should be no big deal) that would help a lot of people, and partly because someone dear to me was hanging on to her life. My little sister who has a severe case of Lupus, an autoimmune disorder. I've been crunching the program for some months now and though I didn't let myself hope that I would see the day when my sister benefits from the fruits of Rosetta, only that perhaps other people later on could benefit from it (Fyi, one out of ten Americans run the risk of having lupus).

But it actually happened. A few days ago, the team started on the designing process of proteins that are meant as cures for a number of diseases, autoimmune disorders among them.

So there, that's the reason as to why I'm writing this to you now. If you have a loved one afflicted with diseases with no cure, if you yourself are afflicted, if you have seen other afflicted people and are touched, donate your computer processing power to Rosetta.

They don't ask you to do anything great. They don't ask you for your time. They don't ask you for your money. They simply ask for the time that you would have thrown away anyway on your computer. That's all. It is a very simple act that would save a lot of people.

The program is small, with no bugs nor trojans, no advertising, no phishing, no unwanted proposition for sibling programs, no credit card number required, no hidden deal. The only problem I've ever had with it is that sometimes it becomes a little overzealous and cause my laptop to slow down. A bit of tweaking around, limiting the amount of CPU usage it can access should solve this problem.

Currently, there are around 350,000 computers with Rosetta installed. Honestly speaking, I've seen indie shops with more followers on facebook and twitter than that (fyi, there are more people reading my writings than that too). The reason for its unpopularity is that the people who run Rosetta...

…. are complete dumbasses when it comes to PR. (If you are a member of the Rosetta team reading this, I mean it, guys!)

They may be brilliants doctors and scientists whose IQ probably doubles mine, but when it came to putting together an explanation or a presentation for their brain baby, they …

…. epic failed...

Yes, they are your typical socially hopeless people of science. Reading their explanations about the project is like reading a legal treaty written in Sur'keshian (if you don't know what Sur'keshian is, it's the language of the planet Sur'kesh, Pranas System, Annos Basin, Milky way, home to the Salarians, a species of amphibian aliens who are too smart for their own good but unfortunately only lives up to 40 years).

Their latest presentation clip is even worse. I think I fell asleep in the first minute. I'm not sure. My brain was a bit hazy at the time.

Anyway, my point is: please go check them out, and give them a chance. I'm throwing them some free PR, and they sure can use it.

And if you, the one reading this, are a member of the Rosetta team, tell your fellow Salarians disguised as humans to hire a human PR major to help out, maybe even hoodwink them into working for you for free. I'm sure your colossus IQ point can think of something. But get professional help...

…. seriously!


End file.
